February 27, 2006 :: Analysis
Foreign Affairs this month published a major article on the future of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) written by Keir A. Lieber, assistant professor at Notre Dame, and Daryl G. Press, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The article argues that with the U.S. arsenal growing rapidly while Russia’s decays and China’s stays small, the era of MAD is over and the era of U.S. nuclear primacy has begun. Along these lines, Lieber and Press assert that Washington’s pursuit of nuclear primacy helps explain its missile-defense strategy. An excerpt:
Critics of missile defense argue that a national missile shield, such as the prototype the United States has deployed in Alaska and California, would be easily overwhelmed by a cloud of warheads and decoys launched by Russia or China. They are right: even a multilayered system with land-, air-, sea-, and space-based elements, is highly unlikely to protect the United States from a major nuclear attack. But they are wrong to conclude that such a missile-defense system is therefore worthless—as are the supporters of missile defense who argue that, for similar reasons, such a system could be of concern only to rogue states and terrorists and not to other major nuclear powers.
… The sort of missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one—as an adjunct to a U.S. first-strike capability, not as a standalone shield. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal—if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defense system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes, because the devastated enemy would have so few warheads and decoys left.
During the Cold War, Washington relied on its nuclear arsenal not only to deter nuclear strikes by its enemies but also to deter the Warsaw Pact from exploiting its conventional military superiority to attack Western Europe. … Now that such a mission is obsolete and the United States is beginning to regain nuclear primacy, however, Washington’s continued refusal to eschew a first strike and the country’s development of a limited missile-defense capability take on a new, and possibly more menacing, look. The most logical conclusions to make are that a nuclear-war-fighting capability remains a key component of the United States’ military doctrine and that nuclear primacy remains a goal of the United States.
(Article)
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