I am reposting this for benefit of recent unpaid subscribers and in commemoration of The International Day of the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, September 26th. I realize that all attenuation is focused on the upcoming election, but nevertheless ask that you convey your support of nuclear arms reductions and pursuit of international treaties to eliminate nuclear weapons to your supported candidates as an urgent post-election agenda item.
In an earlier series of posts on this Substack [1], available to paid subscribers, it has been argued that the US nuclear arsenal is too large to provide the desired deterrence effect, because if it was employed at a significant fraction of capacity it would result in suicide. That assertion is based on long standing analyses, which in their evolution have only broadened the range of scenarios under which the conditions for catastrophic climate change will occur [2].
Yet we are stuck with a nuclear weapons program that is based on faulty reasoning, that should have been long since abandoned in light of scientific advances, not to mention because of its tendency toward obsessive destruction. The arguments put forward by our nuclear war planners have become dogma, eliciting a Pavlovian response from our politicians, and with negative repercussions for skeptics. It will never be too soon to discard the MAD dogma in favor of a strategy that includes survival of our species as a requirement.
To understand how we are to rid ourselves of an antiquated policy it is useful to understand its origins and logic. An entire book could be written tracing the evolution of US nuclear weapons doctrine, and indeed one has [3], and although Kaplan's book is heartily recommended it is not necessary to examine it in detail to understand Robert McNamara's basic motivation for developing the MAD concept.
When Robert McNamara became Secretary of Defense at the invitation of President Kennedy, one of his foremost tasks was to balance the priorities of conventional and nuclear weapons in defense funding. The attempts of his staff to understand the process for determining the required numbers of nuclear weapons was thwarted at every turn by the weaponeers of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). Eventually, Defense Department analysts came to understand that people at SAC scoured the intelligence looking for targets, with the idea of eliminating anything and everything in the Soviet Union that could possibly contribute to their war effort. Having exhausted the targets list, they then sought to achieve redundancy: If we postulate that the probability of success of an ICBM in taking out a Soviet missile launcher is 90%, shouldn't we hit it with two weapons to bring the probability of success to 99%, or better yet with three to raise our kill probability to 99.9%? Alternatively, if a city is to be bombed, might it be prudent to send two bombers, in case one is shot down on the way, or better yet additionally target it with an ICBM? Aren't there more targets we could add? Clearly this kind of reasoning led to an insatiable demand for more weapons. Even then, in the early 1960s, taking the strategic target selection and nuclear weapons allocation process out of the hands of the military was politically untenable. A paradigm shift was necessary.
As related in [3] McNamara borrowed the Navy's idea of 'finite deterrence' to craft a concept according to which our arsenal would be sized to ensure a degree of destruction sufficient to deter an enemy from starting a nuclear war. The name - Mutually Assured Destruction - wasn't even his (it was coined by Donald Brennan), and in its earliest incarnation was not even based on the claimed criterion. Rather, the basis was the result of a game-theoretic analysis by Alain Enthoven that indicated a level of diminishing marginal returns once 30% of the Soviet population was killed.
In any event, the earliest record of McNamara talking about MAD (to my knowledge) was in a speech given in February 1962 [4]. In the subsequent two years, the criteria changed somewhat; in a draft memorandum for the President in December 1964 [5]he said
“[I]t seems reasonable to assume that the destruction of, say, 25 percent of its population (55 million people) and more than two-thirds of its industrial capacity would mean the destruction of the Soviet Union as a national society. Such a level of destruction would certainly represent intolerable punishment to any industrialized nation and thus should serve as an effective deterrent."
Under the reasonable assumption that killing 25 percent of a modern country's population would also destroy two-thirds of its industrial capacity, Alexander Glaser calculated the number of 475 kt weapons required to deter China and Russia based on their 1999 populations [6]. Updating those calculations based on 2023 population numbers and reduction of average weapon yield to 250 kt leads to the conclusion that the required size of the US arsenal to simultaneously counter Russia and China is 697 warheads, which is only about 40% of our currently deployed arsenal. Thus we have two and a half times as many weapons as necessary to meet the criterion established at the height of the cold war.[7]
Unfortunately even the number arrived at by Glaser based on McNamara's criterion is too big by a factor of roughly seven or more, if a global nuclear winter is to be avoided. We need to discard the MAD concept in favor of one that provides credible deterrence while simultaneously avoiding dooming the planet should a nuclear war ensue, whether initiated by accident or failure of deterrence. We need to think in terms of sufficiency. It is clear from history that our politicians need to be motivated by their constituents before they will take action. It is up to us, the voters and potential victims of the nuclear holocaust, to decide what level of nuclear destruction is sufficient to deter us from using the weapons in our nuclear arsenal. The next post aims to inform the public's decision process and encourage action.
Notes
[1] https://stephenschiff.substack.com/p/lets-do-away-with-nuclear-weapons
https://stephenschiff.substack.com/p/the-sentinel-system-fc2
https://stephenschiff.substack.com/p/plutonium-its-the-pits
https://stephenschiff.substack.com/p/tactical-schmach-tical-a-nuke-is
https://stephenschiff.substack.com/p/nuclear-weapons-by-the-numbers
https://stephenschiff.substack.com/p/nuclear-sufficiency
[2] Turco, R.P., O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack and Carl Sagan ("TTAPS"), Nuclear winter: Global consequences of multiple nuclear explosions, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.222.4630.1283
Toon, O.B., et al., Rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals in Pakistan and India portend regional and global catastrophe, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay5478
Robock, A. and O.B. Toon, Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1177/0096340212459127
[3] Kaplan, Fred, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, Simon & Schuster, 2020, ISBN 978-1-9821-0729-1
[4] https://www.radiochemistry.org/history/armscontrol/05_mcnamara.shtml
[5] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/r0lygs-wq3pr/23.pdf
[6] https://www.princeton.edu/~aglaser/lecture2007_weaponeffects.pdf
[7] The calculations are available to paid subscribers on request in the form of an Open Office spreadsheet or its .pdf image.