(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in RealClearDefense. Without ICBMs: A Prescription for Nuclear War)

Mr. William Hartung of the Quincy Institute wants to kill the ICBM leg of the Triad, or the Sentinel missile system and he cites a new Stimpson Center report calling for just such an outcome.

However, without the Sentinel missile, the current Minuteman III will eventually go out of business over the next decade and one-half. That means no ICBMs in the near future.

Now Hartung wants to do all of this unilaterally, even in the face of a breathtaking nuclear build up by China and a Russia that can now breakout of the New START treaty limits by multiple thousands of additional nuclear warheads.

Hartung says more nuclear weapons are bad but seems oblivious to any possible effect of a combined Russia-China force of over 5000 long-range strategic nuclear warheads would have on the strategic balance around 2035.

Apparently if the United States builds more warheads– which Hartung says we are now doing by modernizing our Triad– that is a bad thing. But if Russia and China do so its apparently without consequence for the United States. And if the US deliberately cuts considerably below even the projected China level, as killing Sentinel could very well do, apparently nothing in the strategic balance could go wrong.

The mistakes and misunderstandings Hartung makes are legion. Here is the top dozen:

1. The cost of modernization of our nuclear deterrent is not $1.7 trillion but actually $400 billion over the next three decades according to the Union of Concerned Scientists; the majority of the cost is for the current legacy force sustained for the same three decades;
2. The Sentinel is not part of a secret plot to build more weapons—the Triad system as well as the B21 bomber and its LRSO, as well as the Columbia SSBN and its compliment of D-5 missiles all fit within the warhead ceilings allowed by the 2010 New START treaty of 1550 countable warheads;
3. There are probably not any joint arms control limits as Russia no longer allows inspections as required;
4. Without Sentinel or MMIII, and with the remaining current force structure, the US would only be able to deploy a maximum of 1536 strategic missile warheads through 2042; even with roughly 50%-67% deployed at sea at any one time, the US might have only 20% of the total strategic force of China-Russia deployed strategic warheads by early next decade; a condition we have never had to face in the 80 years of the nuclear age;
5. Unmentioned by Hartung is that the US has only one hundred theater nuclear weapons deployed in Europe, zero in the Middle East and zero in the Pacific, and thus is at least at a 20 to 1 and probably 40 to 1 disadvantage re Russia’s theater force;
6. Hartung seems also oblivious to Russia’s current major coercive nuclear capability which the elimination of the Sentinel would worsen;
7. The cost of replacing the on-alert ICBM warheads to just maintain New START warhead levels would be around $160 billion if done through submarines and SLBMs, which would actually cost more than the current modernization effort;
8. If the MMIII ICBMs were also eliminated, the US would have all of about one dozen nuclear assets, the elimination of which would disarm the United States—three bomber bases, two submarine bases and some 4-8 submarines at sea at any one time is not a robust force;
9. Reports are that China has developed new technology that could make the oceans transparent and make a submarine only deterrent for the United States totally susceptible to a one-technology-failure undermining of its entire nuclear deterrent;
10. What Hartung proposes would eliminate all leverage the United States needs to successfully seek some kind of nuclear arms control into the future;
11. Absent a new theater nuclear capability such as the SLBM-N, which Hartung disparages, the US and its allies in Europe and Asia become total victims of Putin and Xi and their common escalate to win use of nuclear weapons for purposes of extortion and coercion; and
12. According to Senator Hoeven, the total cost of the new elements of the Triad—B21, the D-5, the Sentinel, the LRSO, and Columbia class SSBN— is $17.4 billion, which comes to one-third of all annual nuclear spending, 1.8% of the defense budget proposed by the Senate majority, 1% of discretionary spending, and .026% of the Federal budget.

By comparison, the Federal government is victim of annual fraud that GAO says are15 fold these modernization costs. The newly calculated projected cost of meeting the Paris Treaty global climate objectives has climbed to $257 trillion through 2050 or $10.3 trillion a year which stands at 60 times the annual cost of the modernization costs of the B21, LRSO, the Columbia, the D-5 missile, and the Sentinel ICBM.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. OPED: What’s The Best Way to Avoid Nuclear War?)

In 1984 Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick scorched the Democratic Party for always “blaming America first” for the problems in the world. The American people took to her charge and voted fifty states to one to re-elect President Ronald Reagan.

Five years later, the USSR collapsed, all of Eastern Europe joined the free world, and freedom appeared to be on the march. In the Americas by 1991, every nation had a near democratic government with the exceptions of Haiti and Cuba.

Fast forward to 2024, now forty years later, the Ambassador could now give that speech but instead of talking just about the leftist part of the Democratic Party, she could be describing conservative members of the CATO Institute.

In a September 12 essay, Doug Bandow, a CATO Senior Fellow, writes that the United States has to avoid and not fight future nuclear wars but that to do so the United States has to recognize the wars that might reach its shores are being kindled by US foreign interventions. In short, America is the real bad guy in this narrative.

Most importantly, the US is guilty of pursuing “global primacy.”

In the Middle East, we gave weapons to Israel which were used for the “brutal destruction” of Gaza, and thus in retaliation, the Houthis in Yemen attacked commercial shipping in response.

The US is regularly attacked by Iranian militias in Iraq, but it is our fault for being there in the first place. The US “enables” Israeli attacks on Iran which “triggers” retaliatory strikes. Overall writes Bandow, the US does much to “encourage” conflict in the Middle East.

In Europe, the US has “recklessly violated” assurances to Moscow including that NATO would not expand following the unification of Germany. Ukraine engaged in a reckless act of sabotage against the Nord Stream pipeline, so why shouldn’t Moscow attack Ukraine? As for Russia, they were never interested in threatening Europe even throughout the Cold War, and their interest in Ukraine is to establish a protective sphere of interest while the US is risking nuclear war to oppose.

And in the Pacific, Taiwan is an existential interest to China and being only 100 miles offshore from the mainland, is hardly of any real interest to the United States. The PRC disputes with the Philippines are only territorial and about small islands and similarly should not be of interest to the United States. The US commitment to the Philippines causes unnecessary concern in China and could lead to armed conflict. After all the US was wiling to go to war over Cuba in 1962 so we should understand why China is so concerned with Taiwan. As for North Korea, Bandow asserts that North Korea is “perpetually threatened” by the United States: and quips Bandow, every time the US flies a strategic bomber over the Korean peninsula, Kim Jong In probably adds a few nuclear bombs to his inventory.

Defending our allies with an extended deterrent in all these cases risks bringing nuclear retaliatory attacks onto the US mainland. And given the “aggressive US policy” says Bandow, none of these nuclear armed nations can afford to back down.

During the early years of the Cold War the US could threaten nuclear destruction without consequence. That all changed in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Today, the US is the one threatening the core interests of contending great powers including maritime control in the case of China, a buffer zone with respect to Russia and territorial integrity of North Korea.

Writes Bandow, all three—Russia, China and North Korea– have no designs on the United States. They pose no threat and have no territorial disputes with the United States.

However, putting more countries under our nuclear umbrella, does make the US a threat to China, Russia and North Korea. See defending our allies from invasion is bad form.

In reality, these three axis of evil simply want the right to invade and kill their neighbors, but Bandow cleverly says well there is no reason China should be “penned” inside its territory or that Putin’s Russia should not also “influence” its neighbors, and North Korea be free to terrorize the ROK.

So, Bandow thinks it would be better for the US to simply drop its extended deterrent strategy and avoid unnecessary war and bring its troops home. After all, he says the oceans are big and wide and the US has friendly neighbors.

The result could of course be that our allies such as Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Ukraine all build their own nuclear weapons and protect themselves.

Then the US can pretend that through surrender, the world will be safer and the United States would successfully safeguard its homeland.

As we contemplate NW Asia with China, Russia, the NPRK, the ROK, Japan and Taiwan all with nuclear arsenals.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. Is There Now a Massive Global Nuclear Arms Race?)

For most of the nuclear age nuclear weapons were thought by the West to be instruments of deterrence, to prevent war. Today, over time, the criminal enterprises such as Russia, China, and North Korea, that masquerade as legitimate nation-states, see nuclear weapons as instruments of coercion and blackmail. This unnerving point was underscored by the unanimous October 2023 Strategic Posture Commission report and echoed by another new Congressionally initiated report on the National Security Strategy of the United States just issued in July 2024.

On the anniversary of the use of two nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of World War II, it’s appropriate to examine again whether President Truman made the right decision. Most analysis treats Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki as unnecessary at best and even criminal at worst, as solely a political move to intimidate the USSR, detract from Moscow’s role in defeating the Japanese and to show folks who was boss. On top of which, it is often claimed the Japanese government was ready to surrender, primarily as it anticipated a coming blockade of the homeland. In short, no such use of nuclear weapons was necessary.

As part of the almost ritualistic assessment of Truman’s decision, this year saw a slight twist in the assessments. A new poll was taken using word for word the same questions Roper polls used in 1945 to test American attitudes toward the use of nuclear weapons. One analysis led by Scott Sagan was disappointed most Americans actually support a strong and robust deterrent, as well as generally supporting the Truman decision to end WW2 by using nuclear weapons.

Such polls also show a public resistant to accepting the idea of lessening the salience of nuclear deterrence in US security policy. And that any such policy would also have to persuade Russia and China to lessen the role of nuclear weapons in their security strategies, a prospect not even far over the horizon let alone possible in the near-term.

In fact, the very opposite is occurring. Over two decades ago, Russia issued a 1999 directive to develop low-yield, highly accurate, battlefield nuclear weapons, a plan implemented by Russian President Putin. China also has built over 300 new ICBM silos just in the past few years and is now beginning to fill the silos with two types of missiles—which can each carry 3-10 warheads.

Projections by James Howe are that around 2035-45, Russia could have 7000+ deployed strategic long-range nuclear warheads, while Chris Yeaw of the University of Nebraska projects China and Russia together could easily have 10,000 deployed nuclear weapons by 2035-40.

In the face of such numbers, what sense does it make to assume nuclear US restraint will be mirrored by China and Russia when the two latter countries have been building new nuclear weapon systems for between 10-20 years? And have even accelerated the pace of their acquisition to where the recently retired commander of the US Strategic Command described China’s nuclear growth as “breathtaking.”

The critics of US nuclear modernization continue to complain the US is accelerating or initiating an arms race when in fact the very opposite is the case. In 2002-3 and 2010, the US reduced its nuclear forces from six thousand down to one thousand five hundred and fifty and limited its theater or regional nuclear forces to around two hundred gravity bombs in Europe. The US nuclear modernization plan now moving forward replaces only the force structure allowed by the New START treaty. And even if we uploaded all our current SLBM and ICBM forces with more warheads, we might be able to deploy somewhere around an additional 1000 warheads over the next 3-4 years but probably not considerably more, hardly an example of the US leading an arms race.

While Russia joined the US in both nuclear arms deals in 2002 and 2010, the theater systems they already had measured in the multiple thousands of warheads and were not under any arms limits. And Russia also has long-range systems that are also not under an any arms limits such as the Backfire bomber, while their ability to buildup far beyond the START limits continues to grow.

The question on the table is thus how reckless Xi and Putin will be with their projected very large arsenals, and will they use nuclear weapons not only for coercion but actually employ such weapons? To say nothing of the rulers in Iran and North Korea who are top state sponsors of terror and are allied closely with China and Russia and each other.

Unless the US builds a deterrent second to none, we may find out the hard way when nuclear weapons are used, as both Russia and China have both threatened to do on a serial basis.

Some global zero advocates minimize China’s buildup and still try and characterize the nuclear strategy of China as reflecting a “minimal deterrent” which is often described as a simple plan to retaliate only with limited nuclear weapons. And not use nuclear weapons first nor use nuclear weapons for coercive purposes or against nations that were non-nuclear powers.

But when Chinese government officials were cited threatening Japan with nuclear strikes should Japan come to the defense of Taiwan, the whitewash of Chinese nuclear strategy disappeared. And just so everyone understood, China emphasized “just as happened in WWII” Japan would be defeated.

So, is the US justified in building a better deterrent in the face of China and Russia building up?

A new assessment of the bombing in Japan at the end of WWII reveals that using the evidence in radio communications of the Japanese which the US was intercepting reveals the central role played by the nuclear strikes in Japan, especially the second nuclear bomb, in persuading the Japanese emperor to break the deadlock in his war cabinet and agree to an unconditional surrender.

Secondary but in the mix was the threat of a naval blockade of the islands. But of no special importance was the Russian presence in Northeast China and NE Asia with respect to the Japanese decision to adopt unconditional surrender, although the Russian presence may have impacted the regional decisions of some Japanese forces on the Asian mainland to stop fighting.

The end of the war and the Japanese surrender was not just a relief from the prospects of an island invasion and more than one million American and allied soldier casualties. While one million Japanese civilians tragically were lost in the war, often left unmentioned are the eighteen million civilians killed in China, Burma (now Myanmar), Indonesia, Malaysia, and Korea at the hands of Imperial Japan. The end of the war ended the continued awful loss of civilian life throughout East Asia, a development that must also be weighed in the mix.

And the end of the near half century of brutal Japanese occupation of Korea finally freed the Korean people to create the ROK as a beacon of economic prosperity and freedom—despite a terrible war in 1950-53 brought about by North Korea, China, and the USSR.

The lessons of August1945 over Japan are that deterrence works. Especially when demonstrated as the US did on August 6th and August 9th. The incredible damage done to the two cities just with the use of two bombs seared into the world’s memory the nature of atomic warfare, especially when weapons some 20 or 50-fold bigger than the two weapons used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki became parts of the nuclear forces around the world.

That may be one reason no such weapons have been used since, over a period of 79 years.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. There is a Massive Nuclear Arms Race Started by China & Russia)

The Washington Post recently noted that the world has a lot of arms but not much control. And surprisingly, the Post then went on to explain while the US has exercised restraint in its nuclear modernization—staying within the New START limits—not so Russia and China, with the result that an arms race is underway.

As retired Admiral Charles Richard noted in 2022 China is adding to its nuclear arsenal at a breathtaking speed. Russia has a significant upload capability in the multiple thousands of warheads, especially concerning given there have been no New START inspections for many years, on top of thousands of theater nuclear forces under no arms limits.

North Korea and Iran, one an expanding nuclear armed rogue state and the other on the nuclear doorstep, are allied with Russia and China, adding to nuclear dangers. Combined with its proxy terror groups such as the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran has shut down western allied freight traffic in the Red Sea and Suez, attacked US forces some 170 time in the region, and launched thousands of rockets and missiles at Israel and other allies of the US in the region. On top of which, Putin makes serial nuclear threats to Ukraine, while China says if Japan comes to the defense of Taiwan, it will suffer the same fate as the country did in WWII.

The Post was right to characterize the 2010 nuclear program of record as consistent with the New START treaty. But absent a new agreement by China and Russia to restrict arms, the US is indeed projected to face two nuclear armed peer adversaries for the first time, each with unrestrained nuclear arsenals.

What then are we meant to do? There are two approaches.

As the Posture Commission noted, the program of record is necessary, even critical, but not sufficient. The Senate Armed Service Committee calls for four new initiatives: (1) make all 76 B52s nuclear capable; (2) deploy Sentinel in all 450 silos; (3) establish a SLCM-N program office; and (4) create a high-level DoD official to oversee all nuclear programs. One could also reasonably add three additional Columbia submarines post 2042 as well as add warheads to the SLBM and ICBM legs of the Triad.

Now critics note that we should just improve our conventional capability. But as General Anthony Cotton has told Congress, if nuclear weapons are introduced into a conventional conflict, “nothing holds,” thus requiring for the USA to have both a conventional and nuclear deterrent second to none.

This is where Putin and Xi are making the world dangerous—as they are threatening the use of nuclear force as an adjunct to their conventional capability, using nuclear weapons not to deter conflict but to make it serve their purposes—getting the US and her allies to stand down in a conflict, what the Posture Commission described as nukes for bullying and coercion.

Chris Yeaw told us earlier Russia and China combined may have within the decade some 10,000 deployed nuclear weapons. Annie Jacobson says we need more negotiations and diplomacy—not more weapons. But she does not say what we are negotiating and where diplomacy will take us. She and others say make the US nuclear arsenal smaller—kill the ICBMs and make the US force with 70% fewer SNDVs and 25% fewer warheads, while eliminating any hedge to build beyond the current New Start warhead level.

This idea of killing our ICBM needs some examination. Some six arguments are common.

First, if we just removed the silo targets, the Russians wouldn’t be tempted to attack them. ICBM silos first, New York city next?

Second, ICBM s are apparently on a hair trigger although no President has ever called for their launch in the past 3.2 million minutes since the MMIII went on alert in Montana in October 1962. That is some “launch control.”

Third, for some reason the Russians are suicidal, and will launch nearly all their ICBM warheads—over 900—to take out 400 Minuteman ICBM silos and associated warheads and 45 launch control centers spread over 32,000 square miles over 5 states. While ignoring 350-400 sub warheads that could be deployed from Kings Bay and Bangor and 60 bombers from 3 bomber bases with anywhere between 600-1000 cruise missiles and gravity bombs available for retaliation. To say nothing, of the estimated 800 warheads at sea also available for retaliation.

Fourth, another charge is if the Russians launch their submarines at the ICBM silo, they secure a shorter flight time making it even more difficult for a President to launch our ICBMs back at Russia. But Moscow has around 500 submarine-based warheads in their entire fleet, not all of which are on alert. The force simply cannot hold at risk the entire US ICBM force.

Fifth, given the Russian missiles would have to either be launched at different times or would reach US soil at different times—either scenario would allow the US to launch after being attacked which would place Russia in nuclear jeopardy.

Sixth, critics often say the nuclear modernization effort is simply too expensive. But if you examine the defense budget, all modernization efforts within DOD—subs, sub missiles, ICBMs, bombes and NC3—come to $18 billion annually, which is 2% of the defense budget, and one third of all DOD-NNSA nuclear expenditures, including all sustainment and all modernization.

Another way to measure the cost is that over the 50 years of the ICBM force being deployed, it comes to an annual investment of $2.6 billion annually, compared to $128 billion annually for food stamps and the $76 billion annual Federal cost of caring for illegal aliens. As General Mattis has said, “the US can afford survival.”

To restore deterrence and prevent the world from spinning out of control, continuing the program of record and the newly recommended additional capabilities is the only choice we have unless again as Admiral Charles Richard explained, we wish to disarm and get out of the nuclear deterrent business. We can rust to obsolescence or modernize to deter. Those are our only two choices.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. Nuclear Weapons Essay: Rust to Obsolescence or Modernize to Credibility?)

Dr. Tara Drozdenko, with the Union of Concerned Scientists, writes June 7, 2024 in [https://thehill.com/opinion/4710618-cancel-land-based-nuclear-missiles-to-make-americans-safer-and-save-money/] the Hill that all ICBMs should be eliminated from the US nuclear deterrent, referencing an upcoming meeting hosted by Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) and Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) who apparently seek to cut out Sentinel ICBM spending in the pending defense bill.

The essay cites many of the assumed defects of land-based missiles, and also invents a new problem that only disarmament advocates could embrace. Apparently, ICBMs are at fault for being possible Russian targets. Drozdenko is concerned that an attack on the US 400 Minuteman silos would cause a lot of fallout and nuclear radiation and kill millions of people.

However, she chooses not to apportion any accountability to the Russians that might launch nearly 1,000 warheads against the Minuteman silos, rather, it is the mere existence of the Minuteman silos that is accountable for drawing Russian missile fire. Consequently, if you remove the targets there would be no need for Russia to attack our ICBMs.

It is true that some of the 400 Minuteman missiles and their associated launch control centers are within hundreds of miles of major urban areas with 1.3 million people, including Denver and Omaha. But four other nuclear targets—the two submarine bases in Kings Bay, Georgia and Bangor, Washington and our bomber bases at Whiteman, Missouri, Minot, North Dakota and Barksdale, Louisiana, are near major population centers with 3.5 million people, all of whom also would be at risk if these five bases were destroyed with Russian nuclear warheads.

More perplexing is why not blame the people of New York and Los Angeles for also drawing nuclear strikes as their populations in the greater urban areas of these two cities are 38 million, a very attractive target. While the US deterrent policy is not to strike cities, major disarmament groups including the UCS have often advocated minimal deterrence that targets population centers (not military assets) to deter nuclear war, and the Russians and Chinese have no qualms about destroying cities as a means of deterrence.

An assessment done for the Sasakawa Foundation on the effect of just one 30 kiloton nuclear warhead denotating over Manhattan determined that 750,000 people would be killed instantly and 3 million over time. The point of the assessment with John Diamond was to call for stronger deterrence, not blame the people of the city of New York for getting attacked! But the US could move the folks of New York out of the city and not tempt Moscow.

However true that many Americans would be seriously harmed and killed if the Russians attacked the United States, it is not an argument for unilaterally cutting nearly 60% of the US allowed SNDVs (strategic nuclear delivery vehicles) from the US arsenal, leaving the US with 12 nuclear targets which if eliminated would take the US out of the nuclear business. Cutting out ICBMs would make it easier to disarm the US and make nuclear war more likely, not exactly the most innovative way to improve deterrence.

Dr. Drozdenko’s argument against ICBMs also suffers from at least 12 other major flaws, arguments that reflect an ongoing lack of understanding of reality and actually have no factual basis.

ICBMs are accused of being part of a US led arms race of planned nuclear modernization. Fact: is the total number of warheads under the nuclear modernization program of record fit within the 2010 New START ceilings. Unless the New START arms control treaty was actually a nuclear arms race treaty, such a charge that the US is starting an arms race is ridiculous.

The essay then argues the US actually has a policy of launch on warning of a missile attack. Again, untrue. The US deterrent strategy is assured retaliation with second-strike capabilities. A launch if detected requires a launch conference to be held to determine the source of the launch. Additionally, a second conference would be convened to determine the correct response, and then only executed after the confirmation of a strike with nuclear weapons on American soil. However, the ambiguous nature of the US response capability is what sows doubt in the mind of the aggressor and thus strengthens deterrence even though it is not US policy to launch under attack.

The Russians may be reckless but they are not suicidal. There is no reason Moscow would strike 400 Minuteman missiles in the central USA. And if they were intent on attacking the US they would also take out the submarines at Kings Bay and Bangor, the three bomber bases in North Dakota, Louisiana and Missouri, and relevant NC3 nodes. Russia would still know that nearly 1,000 warheads could be coming back at Russia from submarines at sea, bombers on alert and airborne, and surviving ICBMs.

So, the question is, why would Russia attack 400 ICBMs with nearly 1,000 warheads but leave intact some roughly 350-400 submarine warheads in port that could be destroyed with the use of a handful of warheads, especially in that the subs in port could put to sea to strike back at Russia?”

Similarly, the US could have strategic bombers available as the UCS essay admits—especially if generated to alert status with required refueling support. The three bomber bases with upwards of 60 airplanes would have at least 600 gravity bombs and cruise missiles to launch back at Russia. This retaliatory force is available 24/7. What evidence is there that Russia doesn’t understand this?

The essay next claims the USAF has determined the US can keep Minuteman around through 2036 and that somehow, they are pretending otherwise. Actually, the Minuteman III force is required by law to be sustained and maintained “through 2030” as an NDAA amendment by former Senator Kent Conrad required. The planned deployment of Sentinel has always been from roughly 2031-36, although there now may be a delay in that deployment of an estimated 2 years.

Credibly maintaining a working MM III is not planned beyond those years and that has been the basis for the schedule of the Sentinel acquisition program. The cost of the Sentinel missile itself has remained at the original estimated cost. The increase projected costs have been in the ground equipment, launch control centers, silos and cabling that operates the system as it is now some 55 years old. New projections simply now estimate it will be more expensive to redo the infrastructure, although when completed the operating costs are estimated to be significantly lower and save the country some tens of billions. No one is using any fuzzy calendar math.

However, if defense opponents, including the disarmament cheerleaders, had not kicked the modernization can down the road for nearly 40 years, the US could have modernized in sequence rather than simultaneously recapitalizing all three legs of the Triad, and consequently significantly reduced the annual cost of the nuclear enterprise.

In the current planned budget for FY2024, Sentinel costs $4.8 billion in RDT&E and Acquisition including all re-entry/warhead work. The missile will be deployed through 2080 and even with the $132 billion price tag, will require an investment — very reasonable — of $2.9 billion annually.

The critics of ICBMs continue to find clever ways to apply creative accounting to cook the books, now in this new essay raising the estimated price to $313 billion over 50 years which implies nearly $200 billion for the annual maintenance and the current planned warhead enhancements but for 50 years.

Given the current cost of MMIII 0&M of $1 billion annually, projecting the new costs to $4 billion annually is absurd. Why not stretch out the costs for 100 years and get an even bigger number?

CBO specializes in this trick, adding $98 billion to one of their recent cost estimates for “potential projected” growth. Their July 2023 assessment headline was that all nuclear activity for the next ten years would cost $756 billion, but the actual modernized element would cost $247 billion, or one-third of the total cost, with operations and maintenance of the existing force and nuclear command and control through 2032 at over $400 billion, a cost that would be incurred if the United States simply kept the legacy force and indeed risked “rusting to obsolescence.”

Usually, Congress looks at 5- year budgets but let’s try this expanded horizon. By comparison, the food stamp program for the next 50 years assuming no annual cost increase would be $5.6 trillion. Have the previous decades of poverty programs worked well, which food stamps were designed to alleviate? Mercatus Center data indicates the war on poverty, since 1965 or for the past 58 years has cost the United States some $24 trillion in today’s dollars. The current annual cost is $2 trillion in means tested poverty programs estimates Mercatus, while the number of people living below the poverty line has grown from 30 to 38 million since 1965 although the rate has declined from around 15% to 11.5%.

The entirety of the nuclear modernization effort over the next 20 years will be roughly $500 billion, as the bulk of the remaining costs will be sustaining the legacy systems, refurbishing our DOE infrastructure and command and control systems.

Looked at realistically, the ICBM program will be fully deployed through 2080. For 45 years (2035-800) the annual costs work out to a $2.9 billion annual investment. Or about 0.00045% of the current annual Federal budget of $6.3 trillion (FY2022) and $6.5 trillion in FY2024, and 0.001% of the current defense budget.

Ironically, Mr. Garamendi previously supported keeping MMIII, in lieu of Sentinel, even though the identified expanded costs, up to $132 billion, are largely related to the new infrastructure that must be recapitalized irrespective of whether the missile is a legacy MMIII or a new Sentinel.

As for warhead costs, if warheads don’t work, which is a risk if we do not follow through on the NNSA plans, and we forgo all National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) warhead SLEP work, well the United States rapidly goes out of the nuclear business. But if we are going to maintain the New START level of 400 ICBM and 1090 SLBM warheads, the cost for NNSA remains roughly the same whether the warheads allowed by New START are aboard ICBMs and SLBMS or just SLBMs.

Since ICBM warheads don’t necessarily fit on submarine missiles, the Navy, to keep just at the New START numbers would see their warhead costs expand dramatically. And if we decide not to keep the allowable 400 Minuteman warheads on any substitute force, our deterrent force will remain at nearly one-third below the New START allowed force at a time when both Russia and China are markedly expanding their nuclear forces.

This appears highly inconsistent with the new administration pledge—a good development– to seriously look at adopting a bold, new, aggressive nuclear doctrine which might very well include deploying more nuclear warheads above the New START levels. Which would be highly problematic should ICBMs be terminated.

You can’t cut if you are thinking of expanding.

Even attempting to keep MMIII and eliminating Sentinel would not work. Soon after the termination of the Sentinel, Minuteman would atrophy out of the nuclear force, as one cannot keep MMIII around much beyond this coming decade. So, after having to spend tens of billions on redoing the infrastructure and the associated warheads associated with Minuteman III, that provides only the current MMIII capability which gives us a shortfall to required capabilities to keep pace with Russia and China. Cancelling Sentinel means relying on a legacy ICBM force that while heroically providing deterrence for 54 years would in all likelihood have to be retired before the end of the next decade.

Since the essay’s author doesn’t want ICBMs to be part of the US nuclear deterrent, we are eventually left with “fast flyers” on only 12 Columbia submarines with 16 missiles each or 192 total missiles. Add in the 60 bombers and the US would have a grand total of 252 nuclear platforms (missiles and bombers) although both the Russians and the United States under New START can have 700. No doubt to disarmers that is a sure basis for strategic stability! And while building more Columbia class submarines is being seriously considered by Congress, those new submarines would only come into the force post 2042 after the current 12 Columbia submarines would be acquired.

Even worse if the US wanted to keep the 1,490 SLBM and ICBM warheads allowed under New START, (to say nothing of increasing the US deterrent force), the D-5 would have to be loaded with 8 warheads each, its maximum capability, reaching a total of 1536 warheads, just marginally above the New START allowable limits, but with ZERO further growth possible.

The more warheads the D-5 missiles carry the heavier the missile, with less range and to some degree with wasted or superfluous warheads. Heavier missiles have less range and may be required to patrol closer to Russia and China and thus occupy a smaller deployment or patrol area for the submarines, weakening survivability.

This also means the US would be without a “hedge” buildup capability, above New START levels, which the US has always had as an insurance policy in the event of a Russian breakout, and now a Chinese build as well. What kind of leverage would that give the US in any further arms talks? The US would have all of 46 warheads above the New START limits, compared to what Dr. Chris Yeaw projects as a total of 10,000 Russian and Chinese strategic and tactical warheads by 2035.

And what a gift to Russia and China to be able to engage in a nuclear arms race which would be decidedly one-sided as the US could not participate. The bad guys build, the good guys stay at New START levels even when the treaty expires in 2026 as the US would have zero other options. [Except admittedly 200 theater gravity bombs in Europe.]

Finally, to destroy all 400 MMIII silos and associated 45 launch control centers, the Russians would according to some estimates have to use some 900 warheads, but they would be launched from an inventory of silo and rail mobile ICBMs in different locations and thus not simultaneously. The US early warning systems would see the initial launches within minutes, giving the command authorities opportunity to act rationally.

And these incoming missiles would not necessarily arrive on US soil together, as US missile silos are spread over 45,000 square miles, thus allowing an assured retaliation and second-strike response from major elements of the US Triad, thus not placing strategic stability at risk.

Eliminating ICBMs also would put all our missile nuclear eggs in one submarine technology basket, a risk the US must ponder as China announced it is working to develop technology that can seek out America’s submarines by air.

This wrong-headed essay’s recommendations would make the Chinese aim to disarm the US easier and incentivize the PRC to go all out in anti-submarine detection and warfare technology.

In conclusion, as one analyst said recently, an individual ICBM silo may be vulnerable, but as a system and as a Triad of forces, the US deterrent both legacy and modernized systems is sound, solid, credible and guarantees a second-strike assured response capability. It defends our allies, and deters if correctly done the use of conventional, nuclear, cyber, space, bio-chem weapons against the United States and its allies.

As retired Admirals Richard Mies and Charles Richard both previously explained, there are only two choices: replace and modernize our nuclear forces or go out of the nuclear business. Clark Murdock outlined the clear danger, we can “rust to obsolescence” or as recommended here, modernize to credibility.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. U.S. & China: Cold War or Cold Peace?)

Foreign Policy is a journal of international affairs that likes to take issue with what it sees as conventional wisdom. This month they publish an essay taking issue with the growing concern in the United States—deemed not justified—over the direction of the Chinese government under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Michael Hirsch a columnist for the Journal worries Washington is unnecessarily headed toward a cold war with China rather than an alternative cold peace.

Hirsch admits of Chinese aggression against the United States but dismisses it as any sign China wants to dominate the competition between the two nations, let alone seek hegemonic primacy. As evidence he advises Xi apparently “pleaded” with US industrial leaders to make investments in China (now declining for the first time in decades), on top of a near $700 billion in annual trade, and that these are indicators China is totally accepting of the current international economic system (which many believe China has been trying to undermine and destroy.)

What Hirsch dismisses is the long ago adopted unrestricted warfare strategy of the CCP against the United States. Apparently, the reports of its adoption were fables.

Hirch tells us the surveillance and sky balloons hovering over top US strategic nuclear facilities were “errant”—not designed to surveil the USA and just coincidentally crossing the entire United States and “spying” on our most sensitive military bases.

The author also writes that the United States strategic modernization program is in “response” to the Chinese nuclear buildup—implying the build is also errant because the Chinese nuclear build-up is obviously being exaggerated.

Actually, the strategic modernization was fully agreed to in 2010 at the time of the New START agreement not in response to China but to replace an aging and rusting strategic nuclear deterrent, and one strictly limited by arms control limits. The companion Nuclear Posture Review of 2010 in fact hardly thought of China as a nuclear threat, emphasizing the cooperative nature of the relationship with both nations, especially in dealing with nuclear threats from terrorist organizations.

At that time, experts such as Rick Fisher, Mike Pillsbury and Brad Thayer were warning about the emerging Chinese threat and were largely ignored by the drive-by media.

It is puzzling that Hirsch embraces David Sanger’s new book on China as Sanger correctly explains the US mistakenly believed that bringing China into international organizations (largely created by the West) would modify China’s actions internationally as well as soften its internal security mix, although Hirsch thinks not only will China embrace this international system but needs it to survive.

And with respect to emerging top technologies, Sanger in an interview with Ivo Daadler explains that some experts believe with respect to mastering new emerging technologies, such as AI, you cannot be in China’s camp and the US camp together. “You have to choose” he declares. That doesn’t fit into Hirsch’s narrative either.

Now Hirsch also says many Chinese economic plans under the Belts and Roads Initiative are failing. And that the Chinese economy is in trouble. Both are true–witness the loss of $6 trillion in market cap value of its stock market.

But does that lessen the threat?

The USSR often failed to accomplish its goals such as taking over the ROK (1950) and El Salvador (1963-91). But the cost to the US and its allies were huge—2 million dead Koreans and 35,000 dead American soldiers. And millions of injured and displaced. Followed shortly thereafter by the Soviet against South Vietnam and all of Indo-China.

The Soviet economy largely failed to improve the living conditions of its people over long decades of economic stagnation during the Cold War. But the USSR was no less of a military threat. And it took the US nearly half a century to get US policy right and collapse the Soviet Union empire.

Yet the conventional wisdom of the time was the economy of the USSR was at least 45% of the United States and as such not subject to being undermined. Ambassador Kenneth Galbreath famously ridiculed President Reagan’s planned economic takedown of the USSR by proclaiming the Soviets made highly efficient use of their manpower and would not be affected by Reagan’s plans.

Yet despite its economic weaknesses, the Soviets were successful in using terrorism and wars of national liberation to flip some 20 nations from pro-USA to pro communist bloc from 1969-80. They caused serial mayhem worldwide especially as the world’s number one state sponsor of terrorism, recruiting Cuba, Syria, Iraq, Libya and North Korea, (and now Iran) all having continued as elements of the past few decades of international trouble for the United States and its allies.

At the very end of the essay the author tells us to remember the lessons of détente but not to do so 20 years too late. Unexplained is whether Hirsch is proposing that the US should adopt detente with China but to do so 20 years prior to when we similarly adopted detente with the USSR?

That “détente” proposal alone shows how uninformed the author is. In many respects we have “détente-plus” with China—the US embraces investment in China including as Bill Gertz explained recently, using US government pension funds through Black Rock to buy stocks in Chinese military companies.

Proposals to be aggressive in taking down China are not met with enthusiasm in Wall Street or in the current US government—although Congressional assessments on China have been well done and accurate now for decades.

Detente didn’t end the Cold War. It actually prolonged it and served the interests of the USSR. Reagan rejected detente (to the horror of the media and the “smart” folks in academia) and as an alternative adopted what became an economic war against the USSR underneath an umbrella of peace through strength.

Is that possible with China given the extensive economic ties between China and the Western industrialized world? That is what the USA has to determine. IWP’s John Lenczkowski has a well thought out plan how to meet the challenge of the Chinese war against the USA. Hirsch seems unaware of it. And Strategic Command head Anthony Cotton has underscored that while the Cold War strategy of Reagan cannot necessarily be adopted wholesale with respect to China, China remains a very significant strategic threat to the United States.

As Hirsch does, declaring our future with China as a choice between Cold War or Cold Peace helps nothing. The issue is what is China trying to accomplish. Does China want to pursue “unrestricted” war with the US? We didn’t persuade the Soviets to stop fighting. We destroyed their economic ability to do so. That Cold War lasted a half century. And détente—if that is a Cold Peace—didn’t work. And only by 1981 did we get the strategy right. The US does not have decades to get things right with China.

The issue is what China does and intends to do. And what is in its most secret declarations.

For sure, the lack of transparency in China policy is not helpful. But we know the PRC is building 360 new silo-based ICBMs (which Hirsch recognizes), and now are developing a new mobile ICBM. And over and over again, Xi tells his politburo and his colleagues that China will be the world’s economic and military hegemon no later than 2049, 100 years after the PRC’s founding. Its Navy is now the world’s largest. According to HASC Chairman Rogers, the Chinese air force will soon be the world’s largest, while the USAF is now the smallest and oldest in history.

The US financed China’s huge economic growth since 1970 and under the assumption the Chinese government would moderate its authoritarian and dictatorial policies.

The US got that spectacularly wrong.

The PRC had their own World Bank coterie of experts that planned the de-industrialization of the USA.

The National Security Agency (NSA) head told the NDUF in 2009 that China was stealing $600 billion in intellectual property annually just from USA industry.

The PRC bribes US academic big shots with $50,000 a month cash to steal research paid for by the USA government and industry. [Must be the CCP version of peaceful coexistence!]

And murders prisoners to “harvest” and sell their organs worldwide for profit.

Hirsch may think these actions of China are just as a competitor with the United States—much as Burger King is a rival to McDonalds. And he may believe the can manage the “competition” with China without war or military hostilities.

But this depends upon whether China sees military hostilities as necessary to achieve their goals. After all, the Chinese leadership under Mao killed 65 million of their own people to seek and then keep power. And Xi Jinping has full embraced the Mao legacy. How many Chinese people is he willing to risk to achieve his objective of the world’s hegemon? After all, Mao when informed a nuclear war with China would kill hundreds of millions of Chinese, he shrugged and said that was no problem as Chinese women would “make that up” in a couple of generations.

David Sanger of the New York Times whose new book on China, Russia and the United States (a book Hirsch strangely embraces) correctly notes that when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 the US did not even apply sanctions until a year after the invasion. And provided only blankets in lieu of military assistance. And he further explains that despite the invasion, Chancellor Merkel of Germany embraced the Russian gas supplies through the Nordstrom pipeline. In an April 24th interview, Sanger wonders whether Putin would not have reasonably concluded Ukraine was available for the taking. Just as Xi Jinping might conclude the same with respect to Taiwan.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. “Nuclear War” Book & Jacobson’s Nuclear Confusion)

The new book “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobson has received multiple rave reviews. It portrays a scenario in which billions of people die within three days of a North Korean strike on the US with two nuclear warheads. The problem? The US deterrent policy that Jacobsen believes is based on nuclear war fighting, and which relies on an automatic launch on warning strategy if Washington discovers a missile has been launched at the United States.

The nuclear Armageddon story starts with North Korea launching a one megaton bomb that hits the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, described as a “bolt-out-of-the blue strike” for which the US is unprepared. Another nuclear weapon takes out a nuclear power plant in California. The United States immediately responds with a launch of 82 ICBMs at the DPRK but inside a short six-minute window within which the US President supposedly must decide whether and how to retaliate.

Jacobson also argues the US has to use our ICBMs because submarine-based missiles cannot be launched to fit within the six-minute window. And since as she claims, Russia’s early warning satellite and radar system are, unfortunately, not very good, and since the US ICBM range is inadequate to hit North Korea without going over Russia, Moscow incorrectly believes that the US retaliatory missile launch is on its way toward Russia, not North Korea.

Believing that the US launch is a first strike against Russia and Putin having adopted a new policy of “launch on warning of an attack,” Jacobson concludes that “Putin will not wait” for confirmation that nuclear warheads have landed on Russia soil. Russia will then launch a massive nuclear strike on the United States. And this would in turn push the United States into attacking Russia with its on-alert remaining nuclear force [which at the start of the war numbered some 1800 strategic nuclear warheads according to Jacobsen.]

The resulting tens of millions of immediate deaths would then be followed by the breakdown of food and energy supplies and the subsequent death of additional hundreds of millions of Americans and Russians. Even worse, the 300 billion pounds of soot produced by the massive fires brings with it “nuclear winter”, as the sun’s warming rays are blocked out from reaching the earth’s surface. The death of billions of people worldwide results.

In a number of interviews with Vanity Fair and Mother Jones, for example, and in reviews by the New York Times and the Cyber Brief, Jacobson argues that the US has a plan to conduct nuclear war fighting which is automatic and set down as a series of previously adopted requirements that leave US officials little leeway to change the US response.

Jacobson also say that one person, the President of the United States, can make the decision to destroy the world, and can do so even without very much information. And she warns, the military “war mongers” have a very “aggressive culture” that has a predilection to “jam” the President toward a “quickly launching a massive retaliatory strike.”

She argues that any Presidential candidate must therefore be assessed on whether that person is stable and not erratic, including as one reviewer noted, an “unsteady commander should not be in charge.” And this is really important, as the country is “at the brink” of possible nuclear war, the book argues. Not coincidentally, the title of a new series of essays being published by the New York Time is “At the Brink,” which in turn was initiated as a means of fully exploring the nuclear disarmament issues raised by the “Oppenheimer” movie.

Unfortunately, the scenario adopted by Jacobson is a “cooked the books” argument. Her book is filled with seriously misunderstood US policy prescriptions, and a gross failure to understand the basics of nuclear deterrence. She asserts nuclear weapons do not make us strong, and need to be significantly reduced in importance, and instead of modernization the US should seek arms control and disarmament.

Not only that, the scenario adopted doesn’t make any strategic sense as well. Why would North Korea just attack the US with two nuclear warheads, knowing full well the US could turn the DPRK into a parking lot?

While admitting that nuclear deterrence has worked perfectly for roughly 75 years, the book warns deterrence might definitely fail and if it fails, any use of nuclear weapons, no matter how small, will result in all out nuclear war. Jacobson also argues that all US previous military war-gaming, going through multiple scenarios of how nuclear weapons might be used, universally ends in general nuclear war. And thus, she concludes, the US policy of “mutual assured destruction” often referenced as “MAD” is itself “mad” and not reliable as a deterrent strategy!

She is wrong on all counts. The US however does not have a “MAD” nuclear strategy and does not have an automatic series of retaliatory strikes to carry out. The US also does not have a launch on warning strategy or policy, although she correctly notes that Russia does. Thus, the US President does not have to respond within six minutes which seems to be based on the assumption that the US does indeed have a “launch on warning” deterrent strategy.

Furthermore, the US would first try and shoot down the incoming North Korean warhead with its GBI or ground-based interceptors, or if available, a better system that is now being discussed and was unanimously recommended by the Strategic Posture Commission.

Jacobson does have the US shoot four interceptors at the incoming warhead, but the result is rigged: they all miss. She references Dr. Ted Postol of MIT that the US missile defense system is only successful 50% of time even in “scripted tests” but in the real world “cannot be effective” says Jacobson and would have almost a zero chance of intercepting a ballistic missile warhead.

However, in fact the GBI system and all national and theater missile defense systems deployed by the United States actually have been successful in nearly 84% of all tests. And while the GBI deployments in Alaska and California number only 44, that small deployment has been due in large part to disarmament advocates that have opposed all US national missile defenses going back to the 1972 ABM treaty.

Dr. Postol however has also been totally wrong about the high success of the Israeli Iron Dome missile defense that Jacobson explains many Americans with whom she has spoken believe the US can duplicate. The Iron Dome missile defense has indeed shot down an estimated 90% of Hamas and Hezbollah missile launches aimed at Israeli settlements.

This Iron Dome success rate was ridiculed by Dr. Postol as unproven. He explained that the Israelis did not suffer casualties but not due to the effectiveness of missile defense but because Israelis learned to run faster to the shelters. Noted Israeli missile defense expert Dr. Uzi Rubin commented that Postol’s “fortune cookie” analysis was ridiculous and was based on an animus toward missile defense rather than a reliance upon scientific fact.

Apart from trying to intercept the incoming NK warhead, for some reason Jacobson rushes the President to fire back and only with land-based ICBMs. However, there is no reason for the President to respond within a 6 minutes window. Even if NK launched a nuclear missile from a submarine and from just off the coast of North Carolina, for example, the warhead could arrive at the Pentagon much more quickly than from an ICBM, but again, what response by the US would require a near immediate Presidential launch decision, especially when no further North Korean missile launches have been detected?

Furthermore, a much more likely US retaliatory response could be to either launch a SLBM from the Pacific from a US Ohio class submarine. Or if available, a Navy submarine or ship based nuclear armed theater cruise missile, (SLCM-N), a technology development that was a top recommendation of the 2023 Strategic Posture Review Commission.

In these scenarios, there would be no over-flight of Russia territory, the US could still destroy key North Korean targets promptly, including the NK leadership, and would be a relatively limited response. A reasonable result? The North Korean launches do not continue. Armageddon does not ensue.

Contrary to what Jacobson assumes, US deterrent strategy is not about “war fighting” but is to ensure the US is able to credibly respond to any adversary launch of nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies, a capability to deter being required across the spectrum of conflict. Such capability is not a “plan for nuclear war” or a “catalyst for Armageddon” as claimed.

It is true that Putin has appeared to have adopted a launch-on warning strategy. But even worse is that his strategy of “escalate to de-escalate” has also been adopted by the Russian leader. Here Jacobsen gets totally confused. It is not as she claims the strategy of the United States to use nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict. In fact, the US military has repeatedly underscored that the enemy introduction of nuclear weapons into a conventional conflict results in “nothing holds”—meaning our conventional war strategies of victory would fail.

And while indeed it was General John Hyten who brought this Russian strategy to our attention, Jacobson mangles the facts. The US nuclear umbrella and extended deterrence over our NATO and Western Pacific allies are not an aggressive and unwarranted “escalate” strategy.

General Hyten warned years ago “escalate to de-escalate” is a Russian not an American strategy. For example, Moscow attacks conventionally, as they did Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. And then if faced with a counterattack which might succeed, Moscow threatens the limited use of battlefield nuclear weapons which former President Yeltsin ordered Russia to develop in 1999. The objective? To get the US to stand down and not come to the defense of an ally attacked by Russia.

Thus, the Russian “escalate to de-escalate” policy is actually an “escalate to win” strategy, as Dr. Brad Roberts has explained. The policy is to secure the fruits of aggression and fundamentally eliminate the US conventional and extended nuclear umbrella.

When during the Cold War, the US would bring its nuclear capability to central Europe if faced with a conventional strike through the Fulda Gap by the Warsaw Pact nations, it was to prevent aggression and war in the first place, not to help aggression succeed.

In conclusion, the scenario offered by Annie Jacobson will scare the uninformed. And if believed might undermine the American public’s support for our nuclear deterrent.

In particular the story is a rigged critic on American ICBMs and Missile Defenses, the two bet noirs the disarmament community has been trying to kill for nearly the past half century.

Jacobson repeats all the criticisms about these systems and weaves them into a threadbare doomsday tapestry. We are told ICBMs can be launched in minutes; ICBMs don’t have adequate range and thus have to fly-over Russia; ICBMs are first strike weapons; ICBMs will end the world; ICBMs cannot be recalled.

Indeed, ICBMs can be promptly launched but that is a positive attribute because it tells an enemy that their key assets cannot remain in a sanctuary free from being destroyed. Given these assets are what they value most, holding such valuable assets at risk is the central plank of US deterrent policy through at least 14 Presidential administrations.

In the 75 years of the nuclear age, no ballistic missile has been launched at the USA. And no launch committee meeting has ever been convened at Strategic Command to evaluate such a launch.

And no President has ever had to decide to launch an ICBM or SLBM.

To eliminate deterrence, or weaken it, without replacing the system with something equally effective, would be a dereliction of duty.

And could indeed put the lives of billions of folks on this planet at risk.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. What Does Oppenheimer Teach About Nuclear Deterrence?)

The new movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the top scientists running the Manhattan project often credited with building the first atomic bomb, has spawned much commentary and analysis about the US current nuclear deterrent, the nuclear balance with Russia and China, and whether nuclear abolition should be seriously pursued.

One such essay (“The Long Shadow of Oppenheimer’s Trinity Test”) by Jack Detsch, the national security reporter at Foreign Policy and Anusha Rathi, also with Foreign Policy, published July 23, 2023, makes two central points. The first is that the massive use of nuclear weapons would devastate much of the world, trigger global winter and possibly killing five billion people. The second calls into question the credibility of the US deterrent to prevent nuclear war, and the need alternatively through a campaign of Global Zero to get Russia and China to join the US in “disarmament talks.”

Ironically, the current disarmament campaign actually makes the use of nuclear weapons more likely as funding cuts and delays pushed by global zero advocates often undermine the very US deterrent that for seventy-five years has avoided the Armageddon the disarmament groups fear will someday occur. And while a major nuclear war could indeed destroy much of civilization, the limited use of nuclear weapons under a strategy of “escalate to win” has been adopted by Russia and China, the leaders of which believe such a war can be waged and “won,” despite their “dezinformatsiya” to the contrary.

Detsch/Rathi contend the US spends far too much on nuclear deterrence, but then acknowledge that much of the nuclear industry that makes up the nuclear infrastructure, for example, is indeed “falling into despair,” what former CSIS/PONI Director Clark Murdock once described as “rusting to obsolescence.” Ironically, it has been the global zero advocates that for multiple decades refused to adequately fund a modernized nuclear deterrent, thus leading to the significant aging of US legacy nuclear systems and infrastructure that now costs so much to sustain.

Detsch and Rathi complain the Biden administration is unnecessarily pursuing an “arms race” with a planned more than $1 trillion nuclear modernization effort, which they blame on “Pentagon hawks” as if the Administration and Congress have no role in the current program of record now proceeding into its 14th year.

But far from starting an arms race, all of the US strategic nuclear modernization effort is entirely consistent with the 2010 New START arms control treaty, as the US will build no more than the 700 allowed SNDVs or strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, and actually achieve a reduction in sub-launched nuclear armed missiles as we move from the Ohio class submarine carrying 20 missiles to the Columbia class submarine carrying 16 missiles.

There is thus no US led arms race or “buildup” as Detsch and Rathi claim. Even the authors concede the current US arsenal is “outdated” and thus is only being replaced, and thus not a “build-up.” On the other hand, there is an arms race being pursued by Russia, where 20+ new strategic (long-range) nuclear weapons types have been pursued since the 2010 New START treaty was signed, some not within the treaty’s framework, and by China which now has deployed more ICBM launchers than the United States while projecting by 2035 to increase its strategic arsenal by at least 400 percent, all of which is arms limits.

Detsch and Rathi also appear not to understand the entirety of the US nuclear deterrent is not designed to “destroy multiple Soviet Russian cities,” but to hold at risk the military and security and leadership assets of our nuclear armed enemies, so as to prevent them from having the capability to achieve their hegemonic objectives. The US does not hold populations at risk nor target them and began not to do so beginning with the flexible response posture of the Kennedy administration.

As noted earlier, the essay repeats the narrative that the cost of nuclear modernization is $1 trillion or higher. In fact, in FY2024, the total research, development and acquisition costs of the nuclear submarine, land-based missile and bomber platforms, plus the nuclear command and control and warhead life extension, was $18 billion in the combined DOD and NNSA budgets or 2% of the defense budget and 26th/100ths of the Federal budget. Even over a 30-year period, the cost would not approach $1 trillion.

Overall, however, current nuclear expenditures are roughly one-third modernization and two-thirds sustainment. The legacy systems will be between 42, 50 and 60 years old when replaced and cannot be confidently sustained longer than now planned. Delaying modernization just escalates sustainment costs. And even a Democrat controlled House in 2022 understood this reality and slam dunked the idea of keeping the legacy Minuteman III and killing the new Sentinel ICBM program by a vote of 309-118.

In short, there is no US led arms race; there is no $1 trillion nuclear modernization budget; and there is no Congressional support for dismantling the US nuclear Triad or deterrent.

Detsch et al also believes the US nuclear arsenal vastly exceeds in numbers “any reasonable degree of [needed] security” but then fails to inform the reader that the US strategic long-range nuclear arsenal is some 90% smaller than at its height before the collapse of the Soviet Union when the deployed (in the field) US long-range strategic nuclear arsenal exceeded some 12,000 allowable nuclear weapons.

The actual deployed number of warheads now varies but according to most sources is around 1350, with the number on alert day-to-day probably slightly less than 1000. Through START I, the Moscow Treaty and New START, over 95% of the overall US nuclear arsenal is under arms agreement limits, while 55% of Russian weapons are not under arms limits, to say nothing of the entirety of the Chinese nuclear forces under no limits whatsoever.

This trend toward lower US deployed strategic warheads is hardly descriptive of a country in “pursuit of nuclear superiority” as the authors claim. And our modernized deployed strategic long-range systems when deployed will be no more than allowed by the New START counting rules and thus consistent with “arms control” and are certainly no bigger than the Russian forces. However, the Russian upload capability is vastly greater than the US, Russia’s reserve stockpile is much bigger, and Russia’s theater or short-range nuclear forces are 10-20 times greater than the US as well. While the US did seek to deter the Soviet Union during the Cold War, by the end of the Soviet buildup in the era of détente and peaceful coexistence, the US was certainly not in any kind of superior nuclear position, nor is it today. While arms control has its place, it has not resolved the dangerous current Russian nuclear strategy nor its nuclear forces now approaching 7-8000 warheads.

As usual for disarmament advocates, the essay says those seeking global zero are gentle grassroots folks for peace, but that nuclear deterrent advocates are greedy companies coercing politicians to support nuclear spending in their Congressional districts. “Big bombs bring big dollars” Detsch claims, although the bomb megatonnage of US nuclear forces has dropped some 90% since the end of the Cold War and it has been nearly 30 years since the US deployed a single new, modern nuclear platform. It may not be until 2030 when the first new nuclear-armed modernized platform is put into the field.

Detsch et al also claim the US nuclear arsenal was reduced only in the two decades after the peak in the 1960’s. In fact, US strategic nuclear forces started declining with the START I treaty of 1991 and on the theater side with the 1987 INF Treaty. All US theater nuclear forces on US Navy ships were unilaterally withdrawn under the Bush 41 administration, as were theater land based deployed systems from the Pacific.

But where the authors fall completely off the rails is their subsequent strange even bizarre declaration of the post-Cold War, post 1989 decision by the United States to, according to the authors, “rethink the use of nuclear weapons” and come up with “modernization.”

Actually, after the initial nuclear deployments on US bombers, the US first modernized its nuclear force beginning under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, then subsequently modernized again primarily in the Reagan and Bush (41) administrations. Subsequently, in the post-Cold War period, the US stopped production of the Ohio class submarine, the Peacekeeper ICBM and the B2 bomber (1992, 1995 and 1997, respectively), primarily as a result of the START I and START II arms reduction agreements first put on the table by President Reagan in his November 1981 National Press Club speech, a result of the highly creative work of the administration’s OSD and NSC staff working to produce numerous NSDD’s creating an entire peace through strength framework for joint nuclear modernization and arms control.

If anything, the post USSR collapse period was characterized at the time by USAF General Garret Harencak as a “holiday from history” where the US for decades decided not to modernize its nuclear forces or establish a viable, updated framework for deterrence, both of which the US is now putting together some three decades late. Since primarily 2006-10, the US has put together a modernization plan, which will be completed roughly in 2042, and which indeed as the authors acknowledge, has been supported by a “remarkably bipartisan” Congress, but which is coming into the force some 40 years after the fall of Communism and the USSR.

For some reason, Detsch and Rathi think the balance between the US and China is not one of good vs evil, that the CCP is not communist and not godless, and there is no reason to have a mindset against China that reflects a “Cold War” mentality. But China murders its own people to harvest their organs, exports fentanyl to the US that kills over 70,000 Americans annually, steals $600 billon annually in US intellectual property, and unleashed a virus on the world that killed one million Americans. It imprisons millions in a 21st century gulag, while unleashing its brutal security forces routinely against its own people, and against Hong Kong, Tibet, Nepal, and other of its neighbors. One discovered document revealed China had military designs on some 17 neighboring nations. With respect to attacking Taiwan, the CCP threatened to bomb Japan, a non-nuclear state, with nuclear weapons should Japan come to the assistance of Taiwan, and in the words of the CCP, “make you surrender unconditionally just as you did in WWII.”

At the end, the authors appear to question the entirety of nuclear deterrence in favor of pursuing disarmament. Even the testing of a Minuteman missile was questioned when it is well understood such tests are not part of an arms race but part of demonstrating the credibility of a deterrent. Professor Sharon Weiner is quoted as questioning whether the US investment in nuclear deterrence actually causes more problems than it solves, raising the question whether a world in which the US has no nuclear deterrent is her preference.

She complains one problem is that ICBMs can only be used “quickly” or in a rushed environment. That is not in fact true– in an environment when only a very limited number of nuclear weapons are used by our adversaries, which is what Putin’s “escalate to win” strategy implies, ICBMs would readily be available to respond. And given the multiplicity of technical means of determining whether our enemies have launched nuclear weapons at the United States, our ability to retaliate is what would give an adversary pause, including launching our ICBMs even after the US has confirmed a major missile attack has occurred against the United States.

Finally, the authors repeat the four-decade old narrative that the use of nuclear weapons would cause a nuclear winter, a drop of temperatures below freezing. When reviewed in 1983, I determined all scare stories about global freezing and nuclear winter were ultimately based on Carl Sagan’s original research on dust storms on Mars.

Sagan postulated the huge amount of soot and carbon from cities burning due to a nuclear war would blot out the sun’s rays from reaching the earth. However, the same principle was also claimed by other research to prevent the heat from the sun escaping back through the atmosphere because of the “blanket” effect of soot and carbon, and thus producing global warming and an earth with a “fever,” thus the repeatedly reference by Sagan to Mars dust storms.

Putin and now apparently Xi apparently both believe that the limited use of nuclear weapons does not imperil their survival or that of their nations. That is what matters because it is these totalitarians we must deter. Both of which are running an arms race, threatening aggression and building nuclear forces far beyond anything needed to defend their own countries. Neither has any interest in disarmament, let alone arms control.

Thankfully, there is widespread bi-partisan support for the necessary modernization of the US nuclear deterrent both for the United States and our extended deterrent for our allies in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. Oppenheimer said late in his life he had no regrets for his bomb work, that the nuclear bomb had to be deployed as the US needed its deterrent value. Now 78 years later, that deterrent truth remains.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. How US Presidents Countered the Cold War Soviet Nuclear Threat)

(Washington DC) In 2017 former Dartmouth College professor and nuclear policy expert Tom Nichols wrote “The Mirage of Knowledge” about the apparent disregard or antipathy many Americans have for “experts.”. In an essay published by the Harvard Magazine in March-April 2018, Lydialyle Gibson followed up and reviewed Nichol’s book. She emphasized how the Trump administration epitomized the disdain for experts, noting the former President’s supposed nonchalant attitude about not having a “foreign policy” expert upon whom he relied as evidence that foreign policy expertise was being belittled and its necessity downplayed.

Professor Nichols was particularly worried that when it came to preserving nuclear deterrence, experts were needed, and the strong rhetoric he deemed reckless between the former President and North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un should not replace the calm diplomacy of nuclear experts necessary to preserve peace.

While experts have their place, the assumptions held by the experts need illumination but are often not revealed, let alone challenged. By their nature, assumptions go beyond facts. We can all agree current US oil production is at eleven million barrels a day. But there are no “facts” that can tell you for sure what oil production could be a decade hence and what impact that would have on US Middle East policy.

Part of the continued questioning of “experts” goes beyond the foreign policy sphere for sure. The media-designated covid vaccine experts over the past three years got much wrong. As is now understood, the pandemic was not one of the unvaccinated. Masks were not needed. Schools did not have to be closed. And society was gravely harmed, unnecessarily, by the shutdown—a shutdown the advocates are now (after the fact) fast running away from.

As noted, on foreign and security policy, including nuclear deterrence, there is not a mechanical or science right way to do things. Even those things we did successfully that in retrospect everyone now supports, were not automatic, such as the April 1948 Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO a year later in April 1949. Isolationist sentiment was strong in America, but with the Berlin blockade and the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia, the Senate overcame those concerns and easily approved NATO 83-13.

But a short year later, after getting NATO and the Marshall Plan right, the experts failed miserably. On January 12, 1950, the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, just six months after signing the NATO Instrument of Accession, declared the ROK to be beyond our defense perimeter. To partially remedy US reticence about supporting the ROK, the administration instead sent a military assistance proposal to Congress. Alas, by a vote of 197-195 the House initially turned President Truman down. But in March, Congress thankfully reversed itself and approved $10.2 million in military assistance.

In a subsequent report to Truman in April, however, US intelligence “experts” assumed there was no urgency, as North Korea did not have the military capability to invade the South unless accompanied by massive Soviet forces, and they explained there was no indication of such Soviet forces in North Korea.

With the ROK totally unprepared, with the previously approved US military aid not yet available, the communist North sent 80,000 well-trained troops south in an invasion on June 25, starting a war that would eventually claim the lives of four million people, including 35,000 American soldiers.

Having learned this sad lesson in history from my year of studying abroad at Yonsei University in Seoul, Republic of Korea, I looked forward to working in the US Senate where my national security background could be brought into the real world. What I did not know was over the next decade, United States would go off trolly on a host of important national security policy decisions.

Particularly important between 1970-80 were “arms control” deals amidst a slowed and truncated nuclear modernization; the misestimates of Soviet defense spending and the failure of the policy of containment; the unfortunate adoption of détente and peaceful coexistence; the creation of the what was termed the “Middle East peace process;” the oil embargo and diminished oil security; and the much-heralded US opening to China.

In all these areas, the experts adopted policies that failed or backfired. When examined carefully, such bad decisions had a common origin: the conventionally held assumptions of the credentialed “experts” turned out to be wrong. But because the assumptions remained largely opaque, the assumptions were rarely if ever examined, and thus not challenged, the misguided assumptions remained firmly imbedded in US security policy. When the assumptions were later jettisoned, policies that were adopted succeeded.

While the 1972 SALT I deal was routinely described as the first “arms control” agreement between the US and the USSR, more accurately the SALT agreements were deals that gave the good housekeeping seal of approval not to arms control but to a huge buildup of nuclear weapons by the Soviets.

Years later, during the 1991 Senate deliberations on the START I treaty, the extent of the Soviet buildup became clear. Senator Dan Coats explained that the Soviets during the SALT process, had built their arsenal of deployed strategic (long-range) nuclear weapons to 13,300 warheads, some six-fold more than when the SALT I treaty was signed in 1972.

Not only did SALT endorse a huge Soviet buildup, but the companion ABM Treaty (1972) eliminated defenses from deployment, defenses against China having been proposed by Secretary of Defense McNamara in 1967. This is why Brezhnev as the Communist Party General Secretary demanded of President-elect Nixon in late 1968 that all missile defenses had to be banned as they were highly destabilizing. With the ABM agreement, Brezhnev got what he wanted, giving future Soviet heavy, multi-warhead ICBMs an unimpeded free ride to their US targets, while SALT gave the Soviets breathing room and thus time to build heavy missiles with which to coerce the United States.

A key plank in Reagan’s campaigns in 1976 and 1980 was opposition to the buildup of Soviet arms the SALT process erroneously described as “arms control.” Reagan supported nuclear modernization, missile defense and marked reductions in nuclear weapons and a roll-back policy toward the Soviet Union. By the winter of 1980-1, the US still did not have a new B1 or B2 bomber, a new Ohio-class submarine, or a new Peacekeeper/MX ICBM. In almost every defense budget for the previous decade, nuclear modernization funds were cut, spindled or delayed, with the entire nuclear deterrent increasingly at risk.

Reagan’s agenda was embraced by the American people in a landslide election. This was apparently lost on the experts. As his first news conference as President, the first question was from the AP White House reporter who asked Reagan whether he would continue to support détente and peaceful coexistence. The second question was whether the President would continue to abide by the SALT II treaty, (which had not been ratified by the US Senate but withdrawn from consideration by then President Carter).

When President Reagan assumed office and pushed nuclear modernization, missile defense and nuclear weapon reductions, simultaneously, as he promised he would do, the White House was accused by the media and many in Congress of opposing arms control, “upsetting” détente and engaging in an unsettling “arms race.”

Subsequently Carl Sagan’s nuclear winter scenarios and the Catholic Bishops nuclear freeze campaign dominated much of the news coverage on nuclear forces. Based on studies of dust storms on Mars, Sagan predicted that even a limited use of nuclear weapons on earth would kill billions. He and the disarmament community were aided by the Catholic Bishops in particular who also argued for the freeze, while declaring in addition that nuclear deterrence itself was immoral.

The experts said reductions proposed by Reagan– what would later be enshrined in the INF and START I treaties– were not credible, as the Soviets would never accept such deals. Reagan’s proposals were thus described as a “trick.” As if Moscow was justified in deploying thousands of new SS-20 missiles armed with nuclear weapons aimed at Western Europe and the Western Pacific and that calling for their elimination was somehow unjust.

The Washington, D.C. disarmament community created “Sane-Freeze;” a constellation of “arms control” groups opposed to Reagan’s nuclear arms control proposals as well as the administration’s nuclear modernization efforts. While eventually Congress did support Reagan, the media, Hollywood, academia, and the experts in the professional so-called arms control community did not, buying into the expert narrative that Reagan’s nuclear policies were, by implication, not sane. [It should be explained that at the time of the nuclear freeze, the Soviet nuclear forces were nearly fully modernized while the US had not yet built its first Ohio-class submarine, B-2 or B-1 strategic bomber or Peacekeeper ICBM. That is why Moscow supported the freeze.]

Despite this opposition narrative, especially by the credentialed experts in nuclear policy, Reagan secured the support of Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands to deploy the Pershing and GLCMs in Europe, with the initial research and development funding put into the FY1982 defense budget for the first time by any President, in contrast to the previous weak rhetorical commitment to the missile deployments by previous administrations.

Particularly important and central to Reagan’s success was the long fight in Congress over the deployment of the Peacekeeper ICBM. It was finally concluded in May 1985 when the US Senate by a vote of 55-45 unfenced the Air Force funding for the missile, but only after a legislative requirement that all 15 previous consecutive votes in the House and Senate had to also favor unlocking the Peacekeeper funding, including a 28-27 cliff-hanger vote in the full House Appropriations Committee. By October 1987, the Peacekeeper was initially deployed, remarkably at exactly the time (1974) projected by USAF General Aloysius Casey when as head of the Ballistic Missile Office he introduced the first research and development funds for the missile.

The successful arms control deals of the INF and START I upended Gorbachev’s plot to intimidate NATO in part through the SS-20 deployments, while the Peacekeeper deployment along with the rest of the US strategic Triad partially closed the window of vulnerability created by huge Soviet ICBMs. As Angelo Codevilla explained, and the historically close Houe vote demonstrated, winning the Cold War I and ending the Soviet empire were indeed a near thing.

George Kennan’s 1946 Long Telegram from Moscow on the sources of Soviet behavior correctly noted the Soviet penchant for empire building and its totalitarian expansive measures seeking to defeat the United States. Kennan’s prescription to deal with the Soviets came to be known as “containment” where the US (it as assumed) would contain or stop Soviet aggression. Kennan explained in a subsequent 1947 Foreign Affairs essay that the key was to “contain Soviet expansive tendencies.”

If the US was in fact embracing containment, the post WWII period would be the first test. Stalin cleverly snookered the Western powers and ended up in control of all of eastern Europe, plus half the Korean peninsula, key Japanese islands and northern Manchuria.

Luckily, the US switched gears and in 1950 Truman secured the UN support for going to Korea and protecting the ROK. While Kennan had no illusions of rolling back the Soviet empire, [the first rollback of communist territory since 1917 was the 1983 liberation of Grenada]. In fact, Kennan would subsequently not even support the containment envisioned by his 1946 “long telegram” as he opposed Truman’s Korea “police action.”

While certainly the US fight to protect South Vietnam was definitely within the parameters of “containment,” the US withdrawal from Vietnam and the subsequent Congressional cutoff of all military assistance to South Vietnam, threw containment fully out the window. After Indochina fell to communism, Soviet led coups and wars of national liberation led to the collapse of nearly two dozen additional nations from Angola, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Grenada, Afghanistan, and Guinea Bassou, as they went over to the Soviet empire, many of them located on shipping routes critical to the economic lifeline of the western economies.

Add to that the Soviet failed attempts to flip Columbia, El Salvador, Indonesia and other key nations, the 1970s was indeed a decade where under the banner of détente and peaceful co-existence the Soviet empire expanded greatly and the US went into retreat. Critical to Soviet success was the creation of a hollow military force in the US as defense spending declined markedly.

Those seeking greater US military power created the Committee on the Present Danger, arguing as did Johnny Foster, the DDR&E Secretary of Defense, that Soviet military spending was nearly 30% of its GDP, not the paltry 4-6% estimated by the experts in the intelligence community. Foster finally convinced then CIA Director George Bush to review Soviet military spending, and only after great difficulty did the experts modestly adjust their estimates of Soviet defense spending, arguing that pushing up US defense spending in response would “imperil détente.”

With the US in retreat, Moscow itself believed “the correlation of forces” was bending dramatically in favor of the Soviet Union, and thus the idea that the US was successfully implementing any kind of “containment” policy was poppycock. Yet the media and academia are filled with homages to Kennan and containment as somehow the key to the eventual collapse of the USSR a full decade hence.

In reality, again against the recommendations of the “experts,” President Reagan jettisoned détente, and instead of containment adopted “roll back” of the Soviet empire. The US and its allies, particularly Great Britain, went after the Soviet empire on all fronts. As Warren Norquist detailed in his 2001 “How the United States Won the Cold War”, Reagan adopted a seven-point plan:

• Supporting internal disruptions within the USSR, especially in Poland.
• Promote freedom through public diplomacy.
• Dry up Soviet sources of hard currency.
• Overload the Soviet economy with a technology-based arms race.
• Stop the flow of western technology.
• Raise the cost of the wars the USSR was supporting; and
• Demoralize the Soviets and generate pressure to change, which will eventually implode the rotten Soviet empire.

Needless to say, the architects of this peace through strength strategy paid no attention to the credentialed experts descending on Washington urging such things as a nuclear freeze, a continuation of détente, an abandonment of SDI, and ending military assistance to El Salvador and the Nicaraguan democratic resistance.

Détente and Peaceful Co-Existence (1969-79)

Juliana Pilon explains that détente and peaceful coexistence were frauds perpetuated by the Soviet bloc to trick the West into making mass concessions. While pretending to adopt a less hostile approach to the United States, the Soviets actually funded and armed guerilla war throughout the Southern Hemisphere while also funding terrorist groups in Europe and the United States.

Throughout the 1970s, the Soviets brought forth a cascade of nations that flipped to the Soviet bloc, starting with Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and culminating with the fall of Nicaragua and the invasion of Afghanistan. Overall, some 21 nations fell to communism, many through so-called “wars of national liberation.” And as an unexpected bonus, the fall of the Shah of Iran and the coming to power in Iran of what is now the government chiefly responsible for terrorism worldwide.

So thorough was Soviet détente propaganda, that the very first question President Reagan was asked at his first Presidential news conference was whether he was still in favor of détente and peaceful coexistence. That the new President had campaigned twice on a platform to jettison détente was apparently lost on the AP reporter that asked the question. Of course, President Reagan, to a collective gasp from the assembled reporters, said he was not in favor of détente and peaceful coexistence as his idea of the Cold War was “we win and they lose.” The new President explained he was never in favor of the détente policy to begin with and how could the US be in favor of a policy that was totally one-sided and simply a screen behind which the Soviet Union engaged in war against the West?

The second question asked was whether the President would abide by the SALT II nuclear treaty limits even though the agreement had never been approved by the US Senate, and in fact had been withdrawn from Senate consideration by former President Carter after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, even though there was already considerable Senate opposition to the treaty.

The President reiterated his call for major cuts and reductions in deployed nuclear forces, again characterizing the SALT process as a build-up of nuclear forces and certainly not a process of reductions or arms control.

The experts and conventional wisdom assured us that the conflicts in the Middle East were centrally about providing the Palestinians a state. As former President Clinton would claim in 2014, terrorism would largely disappear if the Palestinians received a state, and that to do so was simply a matter of securing enough Israeli concessions. The “Middle East peace process” was central to this goal, as even Israel went so far to embrace just such a paradigm in the Oslo process in 1993.

The result was not peace. Over time, the terrorists including those from the PLO gave us Intifada I, II, III and IV. In addition, came Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iranian sponsored terror attacks on the World Trade Center, 1993 and 2001, the 1983 terror bombing of our Marine Barracks and Embassy in Lebanon, the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1976 in KSA, the US embassy bombings in 1998 in Tanzania and Kenya, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, and eventually 9-11.

This was followed by the military disaster in Libya initiated by terror attacks on US facilities, and then the subsequent creation of ISIS, all part of a mosaic of continued Iran terrorism in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, caried out by the Iran sponsored Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

On the other hand, when the Trump administration took the centrality of a Palestinian homeland off the table, defunded the PLO, waxed ISIS, and identified Iran as the source of terrorism in the Middle East, (and not Israel), the Abraham Accords resulted, precisely what the experts told us would not be possible. Iran was defunded with its foreign exchange holdings falling to $3 billion from over $100 billion, the head of the IRGC was killed, and the US was finally moving in the right direction along with its allies in the Middle East.

The assumption that the roots of terrorism were based on the lack of a Palestinian state was firmly linked to a blind spot among experts who refused to see terrorism as a state-directed enterprise chiefly with roots in the Soviet Union and their subsidiaries in Syria, Libya, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Terrorism was directed towards achieving state objectives, one of which was to destroy the West and decouple the US from NATO. It had nothing to do with a Palestinian state. After all, the PLO and then the PA have never accepted any of the multitude of offers of a two-state solution.

This blindness came directly to light following Clare Sterling’s 1981 “The Terror Network” which convincingly portrayed the Soviet Union as the prime bank and armory for terrorism, a claim Secretary of State Alexander Haig repeated in early 1981 Hill testimony.

To settle the subsequent media and political uproar, as experts cited repeatedly by the media assured the public that Haig and Sterling were terribly mistaken, Congress required the intelligence community to determine whether the Soviet Union was in fact the prime sponsor of state directed terrorism or whether terrorism roots were not state directed but largely based on a legitimate grievance of there being no Palestinian state. As one former President argued, what else but terrorism could poor Palestinians use when they had no jets to match Israeli Phantoms or F-14s?

The CIA initiated a study and received word back in 1981 from agency “experts” that indeed the USSR was not a state sponsor of terrorism. To prove their case, the experts provided to the Director of the CIA (Casey) editorials from TASS and Pravda “proving” the USSR was not in support of terrorism. The report further emphasized that if Moscow was a terror sponsor, then détente would be in jeopardy and certainly Moscow would not risk that!

A stunned Casey put together a new team including intelligence official and future Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who using CIA staff, determined that indeed the Soviets were sponsors of terrorism, and as he explained in his book “Duty,” published in 2014, the Soviets were even greater terror sponsors than his assessment to DNI Casey reported.

With the Iran created oil embargo of October 1973, the eventual adopted narrative by the experts was that the western world was too profligate in its use of energy and most particularly fossil fuels, that energy growth had to be severely limited, as environmentally sound energy policy required major reductions in US energy consumption and the adoption of a state of energy scarcity.

President Carter said that natural gas would be depleted by 1990, and enjoined utilities from using it. Reprocessing spent fuel was prohibited by the Energy Department as well and the nuclear power industry balance sheets went from black to red overnight.

While Middle East oil companies and producers were the bad guys, the key culprits were American consumers. Automobiles needed to get more miles per gallon, and homes needed to be better insulated. The expert narrative was that the US was simply running out of oil, so we had to use less, as imports climbed to 50% of US consumption.

Now experts often underscored US oil production had peaked. It was true that as petroleum geologist King Hubbard of Humble Oil had predicted, conventional oil and gas production had indeed peaked in 1970 at 10 million barrels per day. But little attention was paid to Hubbert’s other side of the story. Hubbert told me in 1975 that unconventional oil and gas was probably plentiful but at the time environmentally and economically prohibitive to produce.

As fracking proved, after three decades of decline, US oil production rose to 13 million barrels a day in November 2019, just before the pandemic induced economic turn-down, giving the US energy sector the role of the world’s swing producer of energy, an independence not enjoyed by the US for many decades.

But in 1979, global oil prices doubled due to the turmoil in Iran. In 1980, with the Iran-Iraq war taking another 4 million barrels of oil a day off the world market, prices continued to sharply climb, but President Carter only criticized Americans for “self-indulgent consumption” while urging everyone to wear a sweater.

In 1981, in one of his first acts, President Reagan fully decontrolled oil prices. With market prices now world-wide, non-OPEC petroleum production began to exceed that of OPEC and allowed offshore drilling and production increased US supply markedly, with imported oil falling to just 28% of consumption. Later in his Presidency got the KSA to markedly increase oil production, and contrary to expert opinion, the economy boomed and the price of gas dropped from $35 to $15 a barrel.

Eventually the technology of fracking would take hold in the United States, again to the surprise of “experts” to where now 70% of all oil and gas consumption in the US is from fracking produced oil and gas. Natural gas turned out to be plentiful, with upwards of 38% of all US electricity now produced from natural gas. From 1 million barrels a day in 2010 to 4 million barrels a day, fracking produced oil in 2015 exceeded the production of every OPEC member except KSA.

Overall, US production reached 13 million barrels per day in November 2019, but with production now lower at 11 million barrels a day, gasoline prices have now at least doubled, and the US is again heavily dependent on imported petroleum. Drill baby drill worked.

But now, unfortunately, we have gone back to the same experts who were decades ago proclaiming the moral virtue of energy scarcity and insecurity. And still beholden to legislation and energy policy from the 1970s, with an emphasis not on production but minimizing consumption, on top of which the country has appended a massive mis-directed multi-trillion-dollar campaign to end all fossil fuel use, which now accounts for 80% of all US energy use.

With President Nixon visiting China an opening was created for extensive US-China economic relations and eventually a diplomatic thaw. The expert conventional wisdom was two-fold: Nixon was seeking China’s help over time to offset the power of the Soviet Union, and more economic trade with China would create the middle class in China conducive to a more democratic and less authoritarian government.

In pursuit of that goal, the US government spent tens of billions over more than four decades in supporting entities throughout Chinese society and government. One trip of mining specialists from the Department of the Interior sought to help China better manage the safety of its underground coal mining, which even today provides 70% of the energy China consumes annually. When asked to describe the efforts made to rescue miners after a mine explosion, a serious problem in China, the Chinese hosts casually explained there were no efforts made, which dumbfounded the Interior experts.

This is a good metaphor for understanding nearly half a century later how wrong US assumptions were that the CCP does not seek a growing moderate middle class let alone democratic principles with which to adopt. Mike Pillsbury’s “100 Year Marathon” explains in detail the highly misleading US assumptions that led not to a moderating China in world affairs but the growth of what is now understood to be the most formidable military and economic threat to the United States.

The decade of the 1970’s has long been considered bad for US security policy. The United States lost in Indochina and Latin America. The Palestinians kept demanding a state from the “river to the sea,” while terrorism here at home and abroad climbed sharply. Two recessions occurred with long gas lines. Crime was rampant. The Chinese were paying elements of the Black Panthers to assassinate police according to an FBI report to the White House. Illegal immigration began to get the attention of the government, the military was “hollow,” and economic “stagflation” emerged, with 14% inflation and a 21% prime rate.

What changed? Well, US policy makers changed the assumptions under which they lived. Gas turned out to be plentiful as drillers went out and produced energy the country had repeatedly been assured did not exist. Crime was contained as petty and serious criminals were locked up, a novel idea! Starting in 1981, the tax and regulatory burden on Americans was dramatically lowered and over the next four decades, economic growth, job creation and the stock market reached highs not previously envisioned.

Terrorist groups got waxed, inflation and interest rates were tamed, and immigration laws were largely (although not completely) observed. The military received the resources it needed, drugs and alcohol were removed from the barracks, and a volunteer force was established and well-funded. The US military won extraordinary fights with the Iraqi army twice, and took down the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the latter with a combination of horse warriors, B-52s and JDAMS engaging in close combat support.

By the end of 2019, a record number of Americans (156 million) were employed, inflation was a little more than 1%, unemployment of certain minority groups and women, especially those with only a high school education, hit record lows, and the poverty rate reached a low level not seen since records have been kept.

Much that was successful over the past five decades was implemented and proposed to great criticism by the “experts,” while the policies and strategies pursued by the “experts” often did not work and even made things worse. The difference in policy choices was largely a matter of assumptions brought to the policy table by various policy makers. While often declared deplorables and clingers, cold-warriors and hawks, Amen corner friends and unsophisticated, the “expert deniers” turned out to be right, and the credentialed experts wrong.

Angelo Codevilla in “America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations” codified “the disarray resulting from the Progressive management” of US security beginning some 75 years ago. Although largely concerned that the US get back to the foreign policy principles espoused from George Washington to Teddy Roosevelt, the added assessment of what assumptions underlined the Progressive agenda was needed. That is why this essay was created, hopefully to guide the country back to sound and successful policies, whether overseas or here at home.

The media often leads with the “unexpected” whether job growth, energy prices, weapons deployed, that such experts did not foresee, or expert economists did not predict, or expert diplomats found surprising. No one ever asks why the media keep asking the same experts the same questions when the “experts” routinely don’t get things right!

There is much sense in the American people. They may not know how to physically design or construct a bridge, but they understand in the words of our founder George Washington, the need for “reflection and choice” and to place the nation’s policy on moral “immutable foundations.”

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. Could Putin’s “Escalate to Win” Nuclear Threat Strategy Work?)

(Washington D.C.) The war against Ukraine initiated by Russian aggression 13 months ago has been accompanied by multiple threats from the Russian leadership, including President Putin, to initiate the use of nuclear weapons against the United States, NATO or Ukraine itself, threats that are linked to NATO support to Ukraine of military hardware.

The threats from Russia are taken as serious given Moscow’s adoption of a strategy often referred to as “escalate to win” where Russia decides to use limited nuclear weapons, probably of the theater or tactical type, in the Ukraine region to counter a losing conventional fight and achieve some kind of “victory” usually not clearly delineated. Thus, NATO has decided to split the difference: arm Ukraine with weapons but not involve NATO forces.

But there is a larger strategy at play and it involves both Russia and China.

First, irrespective of the outcome of the war against Ukraine, Moscow’s current gambit is to eventually secure the US withdrawal of theater nuclear weapons from a number of NATO nations where American fighter planes are armed with what are a couple of hundred nuclear gravity bombs.

Second, Putin’s ruse is to claim the moral high-ground by declaring that all Russian theater nuclear weapons are on Russian soil, unlike similar US nuclear weapons, not withstanding the fact that at a minimum Russian theater nuclear forces outnumber those of the United States by at least 10 to 1 or as much as 25 to 1.

Third, having a monopoly of theater nuclear forces in the European theater is Moscow’s objective, which would seriously tear apart of the fabric of the US extended deterrent or nuclear umbrella over our non-nuclear NATO allies. For its part, the US has never adopted a no-first use pledge but which some in Europe might believe was US policy by default if the US withdrew our theater nuclear forces from Europe. Even though it has also been long-standing US extended deterrent policy that our central strategic nuclear forces are a critical part of extended deterrence not only in the European theater but also in the Middle East and Western Pacific.

Fourth, Putin knows that Russian regional nuclear weapons can reach much of Europe, while US regional or theater nuclear forces if only stationed in the continental United States could not of course reach any part of Europe or western Russia. Such US forces would simply be a non-factor in any crisis or conflict having to do with the European-Russian border. Exactly Putin’s goal.

Fifth, this strategy is not exactly new. The Soviet Union previously and now Russia has centered its foreign policy strategy around one critical objective—destroy NATO and de-link the United States from Europe. This was the point of the Soviet era deployment of SS-20 missiles in Europe (and Asia) that the US responded to along with key NATO allies Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Italy when President Reagan deployed the Pershing and Ground-Launched Cruise missiles culminating in the surprise adoption by the USSR of Reagan’s arms proposal to zero out all such intermediate range forces in the INF Treaty of 1987.

Even though the Russians violated the INF treaty by deploying prohibited INF range missiles, it was not until the Trump administration that the US called Mocow on this and withdrew from the INF agreement. After all, you cannot have a bilateral treaty when there is only one party abiding by the agreement.

Sixth, Putin has also added a new twist to his campaign of nuclear blackmail. Citing the Ukraine coalition forces use of depleted uranium shells, Moscow has attempted to make the “aluminum” part of artillery shells somehow equivalent to using nuclear weapons. Putin has thus begun preparing a site in Belarus for the implicit “retaliatory” future deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons, in violation of numerous agreements to which Moscow is party.

The President of Belarus, Mr. Lukashenko, now claims he was unfairly pressured in 1991 to get rid of the Soviet era nuclear weapons located on Belarus soil when the Soviet Union collapsed. And that this somehow makes it consistent with sound strategic policy and law that Belarus can possibly host Moscow’s nuclear weapons planned for deployment later this summer.

Seventh, it is true that Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan all gave up their nuclear weapons at the break-up of the USSR, in return for a security guarantee from the West that their territorial integrity would be respected, a pledge Russia itself also adopted, including a formal agreement with Great Britain and the United States to protect Ukraine’s independence and security. Some analysts have suggested that the folly of giving up such weapons in 1991 [and by Libya and Iraq) is now clear, but without realizing that if the good guys we support—Ukraine—have a right to deploy nuclear weapons, the same argument can be made that the bad guys—whom we may be at war with including Iran, for example,—also can make a claim to have a right to deploy nuclear weapons as well because of potential aggression.

Apparently, China received a pledge from Putin at the summit of the two leaders that Russia would not deploy nuclear weapons outside of Russian territory, a pledge that Putin apparently would break if Moscow deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus. On the surface, it appears Putin broke his pledge but something more important is taking place that may explain Russia’s behavior.

China may have understood the pledge was good window dressing. But more importantly, China is worried the South Korean or ROK government is continuing to seek a stronger extended nuclear deterrent pledge from the United States, especially given the growing North Korean nuclear arsenal, both short range and longer range missiles and different types of nuclear weapons. The President of ROK while also pledging fealty to the NPT or Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that prohibits the ROK from developing its own nuclear weapons, has called for the US to redeploy American nuclear forces on the peninsula to counter the expanding North Korean nuclear threat, although it would not include nuclear weapons built by the ROK.

The US Department of Defense apparently opposes any deployment of US nuclear forces to the ROK territory. This is interestingly the opposite of China policy. In 1981, as former US Air Force Secretary Tom Reed revealed in his book, The Nuclear Express, that China’s leadership secretly and deliberately adopted a policy of transferring nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and Libya. An intact nuclear warhead may also have been transferred to Pakistan as part of such a deal. The A. Q. Khan network in Pakistan, what has been termed “Nukes R Us” facilitated the transfer of such weaponry, with the full support of the Pakistani government, which is allied with China against India.

China got what it wanted which was nuclear weapons in North Korea. Pakistan got help with ballistic missiles. China also hoped the North’s nuclear capability would split the ROK-USA-Japan alliance as conflicts would emerge among the three nations of the Pacific on how to deal with the North Korean threat. Unable to reach agreement of how best to counter the DPRK threats, China hoped the US would take the advice of Doug Bandow and others and withdraw our forces from the ROK in order not to involve the US in a possible war on the Korean peninsula. The argument being that a conflict could involve North Korean long-range rockets incinerating with nuclear weapons some portion of American cities such as Los Angeles or Seattle.

The result China hoped for has not materialized. In fact, the opposite has occurred. The ROK-Japan-US alliance is stronger. Australia has also become stronger especially with the agreement to deploy nuclear-powered attack submarines from the United States. Although Australia might sign the UN resolution to make nuclear weapons illegal and thus undermine the US extended deterrent just as it is being strengthened.

The worrisome Chinese buildup is both nuclear and conventional. China too has massively increased its naval shipbuilding and its advanced aviation. Most breathtaking as Admiral Charles Richard, who just retired from heading Strategic Command, explained, is China’s building of more than 400 land based ICBMs at least 360 of which are new. General Anthony Cotton, the new commander of Strategic Command explained in Congressional testimony that China is actually seeking nuclear superiority over the United States in some nuclear areas, and has surpassed the US already in the number of ICBM launchers in their nuclear force.

China, too, has regional or intermediate range missiles by the thousands. It may soon (2030-35) have 1500+ long range strategic nuclear weapons, compared to the minimum of 400-500 which is what they are reported to have today.

The Chinese Navy is larger than the US Navy and because of modernization and budget requirements, the US Navy and US Air Force is getting smaller first before the recently added funding for modernization bears the fruit of an expanded force structure toward the end of this decade. In even the best case, given currently projected defense budgets and plans, a second military window of vulnerability is opening between the US on the one hand and China on the other.

What then should the United States do? Well, when assessing both Russian expansion and modernization of their nuclear forces, some like James Acton are worried the Russian expansion and by implication the Chinese expansion are nuclear “gifts” that US hawks will use as the rationale to push for the expansion of US nuclear forces.

Other analysts such as Darrell Kimball of the Arms Control Association, has cleverly called for a nuclear freeze, originally a Soviet era 1979-80’s idea from Moscow soundly rejected by the US and the Reagan administration. A freeze on warheads even today would give Russia and China as much of an advantage of 8500 to 3400 warheads over the United States.

Ironically, if adopted by Washington, a freeze would actually be an American gift bonanza to Moscow and China. First, Russia has completed the modernization of its nuclear forces to the 90+% level according to the Kremlin; (2) China would expand its forces while a freeze were being negotiated making the strategic balance worse; and (3 disarmament advocates would do everything to stop US modernization as the US is now just beginning to bend metal and build submarines, bombers and ICBMs, all of which as nuclear platforms get initially deployed later in this decade.

As the disarmament community argued in 1981, a hoped for freeze deal would of course have to pause or freeze the US nuclear modernization effort, and not “further” upset the strategic balance. And of course, in 1981, the US was just beginning the nuclear modernization effort of “peace through strength” even as the USSR was toward the completion of another nuclear modernization effort.

Without a monopoly of regional nuclear weapons in Europe and the Western Pacific, Putin and Xi may not be confident they can achieve their objectives including destroying Ukraine independence and engulfing Taiwan into the PRC, even if needed to do so by force.

Senators Roger Wicker and Jim Risch, the ranking members of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, respectively, recently made the important point that removing nuclear weapons from Ukraine was part of an explicit guarantee of Ukraine security. Providing weapons to Ukraine does not violate that agreement, in fact it reinforces it and thus the US is now treating Putin’s nuclear threats as bluff. But within limits.

The US and NATO also know that if NATO forces directly engage Russia, as opposed to military weaponry used by Ukraine, then all sorts of red lines get broken and a nuclear conflict becomes a big possibility. However, as Senators Jim Risch and Roger Wicker also explained in a seminar at the Hudson Institute, yielding to nuclear blackmail re arming Ukraine will simply invite more blackmail. And while we are providing assistance there has to be a strategy to win and the means available to do so. Here the US nuclear deterrent must be second to none. To deter Putin from using nuclear weapons in the Ukraine region or beyond and China from using nuclear weapons in the Western Pacific as well.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.