Category Archives: strategy

J Harvey @ NAF

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A little while ago, Jeffrey put up a “good post”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1544/nnsas-harvey-at-new-america about John Harvey’s appearance at a New America Foundation event.

The post points out, correctly, that

bq. Harvey [Director of Policy Planning at NNSA] confirmed that the Moscow Treaty numbers are in fact premised on intelligence estimates of future foreign nuclear deployments.

Meaning, Chinese future nuclear weapons deployments. In other words, we need 1,700-2,200 nuclear weapons to dissuade the Chinese from attempting to achieve parity with the US arsenal.

p=. *SIOP =/= Arsenal Size*

Personally, I was most interested in a closely-related matter: Harvey’s assertion that decisions regarding the number of US nuclear forces are _not_ based on holding a certain number of targets at risk. In fact, according to my notes, Harvey said in response to a question from Daryl Kimball that holding said targets at risk “is a _relatively small_ driver” of the force size.

What, one might ask, are _large_ drivers? According to Harvey, they include dissuading competitors and providing extended deterrence to our allies. I don’t think he mentioned China by name, but I think it would make anyone’s short list.

_Soooooo_ how do these drivers translate into a number? Well, hard to say. In response to a question from Jeffrey, Harvey said that the process of determining the number necessary to assure our allies is a judgment, rather than a calculation.

Ed Ifft On Arms Control

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While listening to a great panel at the Carnegie conference about the US and Russian nuclear options, I was reminded of a great quote from Ed Ifft illustrating the value of legally-binding arms control agreements.

During a recent “ACA event,”:http://www.armscontrol.org/events/20070611_USRussiaTranscript.asp Ifft argued that such agreements help nations avoid defense planning based on worst-case scenarios. He did so by illustrating the absurdity of current US-Russian tensions over the Bush administration’s missile defense plans for Europe:

bq. If you think about it, *the Americans are trying to build a system to counter an Iranian ICBM which does not exist. The Russians are developing systems to penetrate a U.S. ABM system which does not exist.* There’s a certain parallel there. The point is that this is *one of the great virtues of legally binding arms control agreements is that people then do not have to make worst-case assumptions about what the world will look like ten or fifteen years in the future.*

FYI, Jeffrey had a “good post”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1551/frickin-extend-start-already about the event that you should also read.

Robot Economist On Prompt Global Strike

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The Robot Economist has a great post up about Prompt Global Strike where he discusses, among other things, how convincing Russia and China that the program isn’t aimed at them would be a pretty tough sell:

bq. …it may be impossible to gain international acceptance of the Prompt Global Strike concept. Even if the you could conclusively mitigate the potential for a mistaken nuclear attack, *China and Russia still have cause fear Prompt Global Strike because they couldn’t defend against it.* Does the military [sic] that either nuclear power would accept the idea that the United State could launch any type of strike deep within its territory? *The Bush administration feels so insecure about such a scenario from happening to the United States that it is funding U.S. missile defense programs to the tune of $10 billion annually.*

He also helpfully provides a “link”:http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:IZwraNfornAJ:www.csbaonline.org/4Publications/Archive/R.20021002.MTR/R.20021002.MTR.pdf+The+Military-Technical+Revolution:+A+Preliminary+Assessment&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us to a 1992 Office of Net Assessment study which indicates that the Russians/Soviets had been “thinking about the implications of a long-range strategic strike for decades.”

Light weekend reading.