Spinning the nuclear missile
wheel By Stephen Blank
When
the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic
Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, all sorts of charges and
counter charges flew. Supporters of the treaty argued
that if the system worked, an outcome of which they had
no doubt, it would lead to a situation where defenses
dominate against offenses. This would especially be true
because Russia and America had just signed the Strategic
Offensive Arms Reduction Treaty (SORT). This treaty
formally terminated the state of hostility between the
two states in nuclear affairs and let them build
whatever mix of offenses or defenses they wanted to have
within the numerical ceilings of the treaty. Absent
mutual suspicion, the American defense system and any
Russian system would not constitute a threat to each
other.
Opponents of the withdrawal predicted
that a new nuclear arms race would start because China
would feel threatened by the new missile defense system
which, whatever its proponents stated, was designed
against it, as well as terrorists or North Korea and
Iran. Consequently, China would build many hundreds of
missiles, as the Central Intelligence Agency had
predicted in 2000-01, to beat the system. That in turn
would lead other Asian states, including Russia and
India, to build more missiles and defenses against
China, touching off what they called an Asian chain
reaction.
However, as the US has begun to build
its system of defenses, the consequences of the
withdrawal from the ABM Treaty are manifesting
themselves, and typically they are contradicting both
camps. At the same time, the US has also just unveiled
its own experimental hypersonic missile that could defy
any other power's defenses, and it is seriously
considering low-yield so-called "bunker-buster" nuclear
weapons that could precisely target heavily reinforced
and underground bunkers or hideouts, thus giving US
targets like Osama bin Laden even fewer alternatives to
hide from an attack. Thus, even as it builds defenses,
the US is still seeking to ensure that its offensive
nuclear capabilities could perform if need be in war
time.
As proclaimed, the US missile defense
system cannot really threaten Russia, which has some
7,000 warheads, although it can obviously threaten North
Korea. Indeed, if one does a simple cost analysis of
what it would take for China to overcome it, those costs
are not at all onerous, so there is little reason to
believe this system could prevent a Chinese nuclear
attack on the continental United States, especially as
China is turning out ever larger numbers of ballistic
and cruise missiles. More importantly, the intended
missile defense system is a monument to the idea that
genuinely effective defenses, with a reasonable
possibility of successfully countering missile threats,
can be built.
Such an occurrence would mark the
first time any reliably successful missile defense has
been built and that achievement would represent a turn
of the endlessly revolving strategic wheel between
offensive and defensive innovation toward the defense's
advantage, at least in regard to ballistic nuclear
missiles.
However, the Russian side's continued
belief that it cannot let the US possess a missile
defense system that gives it the freedom to launch
offensive missiles secure in the knowledge that its
defenses could successfully deal with any intended
retaliation from Russia drove Moscow to try to imitate
American policy. In this respect, the Russian military
is not just acting out its suspicions of the US that go
back decades. It also is doing what any prudent
strategist would recommend, despite the fact that there
are no conceivable grounds for war with Russia.
Possession of nuclear weapons mandates that a government
and its armed forces act to safeguard the ability to use
them, find military utility in using nuclear weapons and
extract the maximum strategic benefits that can be
garnered from merely having nuclear weapons.
Just as Washington has sought to build both
defenses and hypersonic missiles that could overcome
missile defenses, Russia has done so too. Russia
apparently seeks to counter the missile defense system,
as critics warned, by building more missiles or missiles
that could overcome the system. Indeed, it is doing
both. At the same time, a second, less advertised reason
for Moscow's policies, in spite of the fact that nobody
believes a war with America is anywhere on the horizon
or desirable, or even likely at some future date, is
Moscow's growing concern about rising Chinese power.
Given present indices of economic and military
power and the depopulation of Asiatic Russia, Russian
fears of rising Chinese economic and military power have
become ever more palpable. This rising concern takes
place even though Russia proclaims China as its
strategic partner. Indeed, it is precisely because
Russia cannot afford to antagonize China that it makes
this statement of partnership and refrains from
proclaiming that its exercises are not only intended for
anti-American, but also possibly for anti-Chinese
missions and operations. The same holds true for nuclear
weapons, with the added point that Moscow's glaring
conventional weaknesses which could well increase
relative to China's conventional military power enhances
the role of its nuclear deterrent vis-a-vis Beijing and
makes the development of survivable (ie mobile as well
as hypersonic) missiles and reliable defenses even more
important. Therefore, Moscow must develop both its
offenses and defenses to guard against potential, even
if unlikely, US and/or Chinese threats.
Accordingly, in February and April, Moscow
successfully tested hypersonic missiles that could carry
a nuclear warhead along with its ground-based mobile
TOPOL-M ICBM. If further tests of the TOPOL-M are
successful, it will be deployed later this year and the
same principle applies to the hypersonic missile. Moscow
has proclaimed that the hypersonic missile could
overcome any missile defense and that the recent
experiments it undertook during the war games in
February that featured the test of the missile "affect
the whole philosophy of military-strategic interaction".
Such far-reaching claims cannot be made here, however if
these claims about the hypersonic missile's ability to
evade missile defense are, in fact, true, then that test
and the successful American test of its own hypersonic
missile will soon give the wheel of strategic innovation
another turn and create a weapon against which there is
no existing defense. In effect, that development could
and probably will stimulate someone to find a new way
for the offense to trump the defense, and so on. Here
again the critics have a point in that it appears that
the cycle of offense and defense each seeking to trump
each other is taking place rather than a transition to a
defense dominated world.
Certainly Russia's
claims would seem to confirm that point. Moscow coyly
refrains from stating that this "hypersonic flying
vehicle" is actually a ballistic or cruise missile but
does state that it can maneuver between space and the
earth's atmosphere, making it harder to even conceive of
ways to defend against it. Certainly, this claim, if it
is true, can also further stimulate the ongoing
weaponization of space. Meanwhile, Russia is also adding
three warheads per TOPOL rather than the one warhead per
missile it had originally deployed. By putting multiple
warheads on this mobile and hence more survivable
missile, it hopes to ensure the preservation of a robust
offensive capability to counter any other government's
potential missile defenses and it thus recreates the
Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs) that were
so prominent a feature of the strategic landscape after
1970.
Since the SORT treaty allows Russia to
build whatever it likes within the numerical parameters
of the treaty, this procedure saves it a lot of money
which it can ill afford to spend. Similarly, it is also
outfitting these missiles with a so-called unique
"gliding" warhead that allows a missile to change its
trajectory at the last moment to elude detection and
interception. Thus Moscow, in spite of the fact that it
professes a desire to cooperate with Washington on
missile defense, will stage a missile defense exercise
with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 2005, and
as it does not allege a nuclear threat from Washington,
it has perhaps already trumped the American missile
defense plan and put the restoration of offensive
primacy in the nuclear sphere back on the agenda as the
new and emerging status quo.
The China
factor Furthermore, China, too, is not resting on
its laurels, despite its public silence about the end of
the ABM treaty and the US missile defense program. After
all, it, too, has a vital interest in Russian strategic
developments and its cooperation with the Russian
military across a host of systems and technologies
probably gives it a good idea of Russian strategic
thinking and programs. As both Moscow and Washington
well know, China is also working on ways to counter the
US program which will obviously have an impact on its
strategic posture vis-a-vis Russia. As many analysts
have stated, China is building many more missiles of all
kinds of provenance, short, medium and long-range and
both ballistic and cruise missiles. It will not be
difficult for Beijing to place nuclear warheads on those
missiles to target all of its potential adversaries,
including Russia.
But China also has accelerated
its own space program and plans for the military use of
space, perhaps even in a first-strike or preemptive mode
to knock out US satellites and leave the missile defense
system blind. Thus while it follows Russia's suit by
building more missiles, it also is apparently aiming to
undermine the US system's command, control, and
communications capabilities that link it to terrestrial
sensors. China has also recently launched two
nano-satellites into space. As a result analysts like
Richard Fisher of the Center for Security Policy in
Washington argue that "China will use micro and
nano-satellites for a range of missions, surveillance,
reconnaissance, communication, and for destroying enemy
satellites. Their size makes them difficult, if not
impossible, to detect and either avoid or shoot down."
Thus none of the main players in the nuclear
arena are resting content with the idea of a
defense-dominated world, even as Washington and Moscow,
if not Beijing, are building missile defenses. While
Washington explores low-yield and supposedly more
precise nuclear weapons that could also serve as "bunker
busters" and hypersonic missiles, Moscow also is
building its defenses and hypersonic, missiles along
with more mobile and multiple independently targeted
reentry vehicles (MIRVs) on its TOPOL-M missiles. China
is building more missiles and also appears to be
focusing on depriving either side's defenses from
finding its missiles and thus concentrates on attacking
their command, control, communications, intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities (C4ISR in
military parlance) while also moving to join the other
two governments in weaponizing space. Meanwhile, the
full extent of its own offensive nuclear programs and of
any missile defenses that it is building remains
unclear. China has also shut down public discussions of
its military collaboration with the Russian armed
forces, which almost certainly includes issues
pertaining to missile defenses and missiles.
Whatever one wants to make of these facts, it
cannot be said that they reliably and certainly are
ushering in an era of incontestable defense dominance.
Innovations in strategy and technology have not stopped
and probably never will. Arms controllers and many
others may not like these prospects even though they
warned about them. But in fact the new missiles will
replace, not add to, existing capabilities and if it is
assumed that policy is in some measure a rational
response to existing conditions, the supporters of
missile defense have a strong argument.
Deterrence today is clearly not feasible as a
merely two-sided game, as was the case during the Cold
War. Observers on all sides recognize this. The
distinguished Indian defense expert Brahma Chellaney
wrote: "In the evolving situation, the existing premises
of arms control, like the traditional principles of
deterrence, are unlikely to hold. It is no accident that
the process of arms control has ground to a halt in this
state of fluidity. The proposed elimination of
multiple-warhead ICBM's under START II was designed to
encourage a shift from launch-on-warning to a
launch-under-attack posture. But Moscow has made it
clear that it intends to stick to a launch-on-warning
posture (which is indistinguishable from the capability
to preempt) and may not even eliminate its
multiple-warhead ICBMs if Washington begins to deploy
NMD. In a complex world marked by conflicting trends, it
is apparent that each deterrent relationship will be
different from the other, premised on principles at
variance with classical deterrence theory. The concept
of mutually assured destruction is losing relevance.
Deterrence will be constructed on principles radically
different from notions of qualitative or quantitative
parity."
Although he was wrong about Russia's
reaction, because Moscow cannot afford more than what is
contained in the SORT, he certainly is right that
deterrence will have to be built on new principles as
multiple actors are deterring each other, not to mention
terrorists who might yet gain control of nuclear weapons
and use them. Thus a defense-dominated world has yet to
arrive, but that does not undermine the arguments of
those who who supported missile defense. Russia and
China's pubic reactions to the US withdrawal form the
ABM treaty were much less strident than what those
governments had earlier promised. Although the first
reactions to that withdrawal are now appearing, they
were in act policy decisions long before the withdrawal
was announced. In other words, they would have been
taken for good reasons regardless of Washington's
decision. Moscow has to cut missiles and China clearly
felt impelled to build many and diverse types of new
ones. Though defense domination is nonexistent, mutual
hostility and suspicion among the great nuclear powers
is at its lowest ebb in years, making nuclear Armageddon
scenarios more remote than they ever have been, except
for those threatened by rogue states and terrorists.
While the critics might be right about states'
reactions, they failed to grasp the changing context of
deterrence and strategy that supporters of missile
defense had glimpsed even in the 1990s.
Thus the
quest for defending state interests, for finding good
uses for nuclear weapons to safeguard state interests,
and for crafting the appropriate force structures and
strategy continues, as does the search for offensive and
then defensive invention that will restore primacy to
one or the other process. As long as governments and
militaries are charged with protecting their peoples and
these technologies cannot be disinvented, the quest for
strategic superiority, self-defense and usable weapons
will continue unless checked by policy and
non-threatening relationships among the nuclear powers.
Similarly, the quest for strategic innovations to ensure
the reliable protection of state interests will also
continue unabated, absent major changes in international
affairs. Arguably those are the lessons of the Cold War,
and despite the saliency of terrorism and other forms of
unconventional conflict in our time, they may turn out
to be a lesson for our time as well.
Stephen Blank is an independent
analyst of international affairs living in Harrisburg
PA.
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