Dwelling obsessively on the policy U-turns accompanying recent US presidential transitions — 2017, 2021 and soon next year — causes whiplash and vertigo, and is hazardous to your health. So let us focus on just one that encapsulates the unique danger of our moment in history. It is the controversy over the US’ plans to build new cruise missiles that will be tipped by nuclear warheads and launched from ships or submarines.
Enthusiasm for this project, expensive and complicated as it is, dates to former US president Donald Trump’s first term. US President Joe Biden then canceled the plan, even though the US Congress kept appropriating funds. Now that Trump is back, he is sure to want that nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) after all.
Already in his first term, Russia was modernizing its nuclear forces, China was accelerating its own build-out, North Korea was getting ready to do the same and Iran was thinking about it. (The new twist, aside from several hot wars, is that these nations are increasingly forming an anti-US “axis.”) So the Trump administration sped up the US’ own modernization, by putting more money into new warheads and new missiles, bombers and submarines to fire them, and into researching this new sea-launched cruise missile. That marked a historic shift.
Illustration: Mountain People
Almost all of the nuclear weapons in the US arsenal today are “strategic.” Each packs many Hiroshimas of explosive power and can traverse the globe to strike any adversary who initiates an atomic attack against the US or its allies, thus deterring such a pre-emptive strike.
During the Cold War the US also had thousands of more limited (though still diabolical) “tactical” nuclear weapons meant to be launched at shorter ranges to defeat enemy armies in Europe or Asia. After 1991, though, successive presidents largely got rid of those. (The US retains only about 100 tactical warheads in Europe, which allied nations’ planes could drop in an emergency.) As part of that divestment, the US Navy also retired the nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles it had placed on ships and submarines in the 1980s.
The gist of US military doctrine after the Cold War was instead to rely on superiority in conventional (non-nuclear) lethality. The purpose of the remaining fission weapons was mainly to prevent nuclear war. Biden even flirted with an explicit policy (adopted only by China) of “no first use.” So the objective with nuclear weapons was never to use them, but instead to cap, and eventually shrink, their numbers. The most important element of that effort has been the New START treaty between the US and Russia.
However, the US’ adversaries have taken a different view. Aware that they would probably lose a full-bore conventional war against the US, Russia in particular, but also China and North Korea, started adding smaller tactical nuclear weapons to their arsenals (which are not covered by the New START treaty). Russia now outnumbers the US by about 10 to 1 in that category. The Kremlin’s assumption is that by demonstratively dropping one or two early in a conflict, Russia could make the US back off rather than risk escalation to a full nuclear exchange and Armageddon.
The first Trump administration wanted to challenge those assumptions in Moscow, Beijing and elsewhere by adding back some tactical nuclear weapons, such as the SLCM-N. Because these weapons would be limited as opposed to strategic, it argued, they would give the US president “flexible and low-yield options” in foreign theaters of war. What could possibly be bad about having more options?
The US Congress agreed and has appropriated funds to develop the SLCM-N every year since Trump’s first request, but the Biden administration put the project on ice. One of its arguments is cost (the budget is tight, and spending more on these nuclear weapons means spending less on other weapons, or even things such as healthcare). Another is redundancy: Why not attach tactical warheads to the ballistic missiles on the submarines that are already roaming the seas?
However, the underlying conundrum goes much deeper. Would the SLCM-N, and by extension any new tactical nuclear weapon, strengthen US deterrence in Europe and Asia? Or would it end up destabilizing the mutual deterrence regime among all nuclear powers (currently nine, 10 if Iran joins the club)?
Giving leaders new low-yield options might tempt them to use these nuclear weapons in a crisis. That would break the nuclear taboo and make atomic war more likely.
Take the current standoff between Russia and the West in eastern Europe, from the hot war in Ukraine to the hybrid war in the Baltic. Russian President Vladimir Putin has for the past thousand days hinted that he might respond to greater US or NATO support for Ukraine by dropping tactical nuclear weapons, either in Ukraine or elsewhere. This week, he even signed off on a new doctrine to that effect. (Whether his threat is credible is another matter.)
Biden, for his part, has made clear to Putin that any use of nuclear weapons would have drastic consequences for Russia, the regime and Putin, but the US would respond with an overwhelming conventional, as opposed to nuclear, strike, to prevent escalation to a nuclear exchange between Russia and the West.
Imagine, for purposes of our war game, that US submarines armed with conventional ordnance as well as nuclear cruise missiles start floating around Russia. Now Putin drops a nuclear weapon in the Black Sea. The US begins its punitive strike, and the submarines launch. The Kremlin has minutes to decide what is incoming: Conventional missiles or nuclear weapons? And if the latter, are they aiming at Russia’s command and control? With the missiles still in the air, Russia launches more tactical nuclear weapons.
A spiral of launches and counterlaunches then instantaneously makes the academic distinction between tactical and strategic weapons meaningless. All adversaries would have to make decisions within minutes and under existential pressure (North Korea, say, might panic and strike South Korea). The risk for miscalculation soars.
One scientific simulation modeled how a single Russian tactical strike, in the space of less than an hour, could escalate into a full nuclear exchange that left 44 million dead and 57 million injured, not counting the radiation fatalities that come later. Against that background, is it still always better to have more “options”?
This is not necessarily an argument against the SLCM-N or other US tactical nuclear weapons. The blame for today’s instability lies squarely with Putin, for breaking the nuclear taboo with his threats; with China, for racing to reach nuclear parity with Russia and the US in about a decade; and with both Russia and China for ganging up and forcing the US to worry about facing a united front.
So Trump must make two big decisions: First, whether to increase the US arsenal of strategic weapons to match the combined total of China and Russia, at the cost of starting a new and ruinous arms race, and second, whether to add tactical nuclear weapons again and incorporate them into nuclear doctrine. Both questions will come up in his first year, not least because the New START treaty expires in February 2026, and there will soon be nothing left to constrain the nuclear superpowers.
If Trump really believes in his slogan of “peace through strength,” he would use the prospect of the SLCM-N, even before it exists, to prod Moscow and Beijing into new arms-control talks. Trump might sway them with a reference to Anton Chekhov that they would recognize: If in the first act of a play you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following in must be fired. If that gun has a nuclear tip, surely it would be better for all involved not to hang it on the wall in the first place.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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