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The Logic Of ICBMs, And Why A President Biden Is Certain To Agree

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There has been a flurry of commentaries recently speculating that a Biden administration might not proceed with plans to replace the nation’s 50-year-old force of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

Byron Callan, a seasoned observer of U.S. defense policy, raised the possibility in an August 13 analysis. Matt Korda, a Forbes contributor, reported on a survey finding that most Americans want to get rid of the missiles; he described ICBMs as “outdated, destabilizing, and very expensive.” The Arms Control Association called for a rethink of nuclear modernization plans, and singled out new ICBMs as one item that might not be necessary.

Support for arms control and nuclear disarmament traditionally has been concentrated in the Democratic Party—Republicans tend to prefer “peace through strength”—so it wouldn’t be surprising if Joe Biden is elected that he might launch a review of nuclear plans, as Byron Callan suggests.

However, having followed U.S. nuclear strategy for 40 years and taught the subject at Georgetown, I can confidently predict that the program to buy a new land-based nuclear force, called the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, will go forward.

This outcome will result partly from the fact that Joe Biden is a common-sense centrist who respects the views of experts. He will find few if any experts in the nation’s nuclear establishment who think phasing out ICBMs would make us safer.

But the main reason Biden would go along with the plan to buy 640 new ICBMs, 400 of which would be deployed in underground silos in the upper Midwest, is because the logic of having such a force is hard to refute. Of course Biden would like to spend the $100 billion needed to sustain such a force through 2075 on other things, but not if it makes the possibility of nuclear war more likely.

And according to most of the experts, it could. ICBMs are one leg of a three-part deterrent force known as the strategic triad. The other two legs are submarine-based ballistic missiles and bombers equipped with both nuclear gravity bombs and cruise missiles (also known as “standoff” weapons because they eliminate the need for bombers to penetrate enemy air defenses).

The military backed into the notion of a strategic triad during the early years of the Cold War, and then came to believe that it was the optimum approach to preventing the carnage of nuclear war in the absence of effective defenses.

Washington long ago concluded that nuclear weapons were so powerful and our rivals had so many of them that protection against a large attack was impossible. So when it comes to Russia and China, U.S. nuclear strategy focuses on removing any incentive to attack the U.S., even in an extreme crisis.

The key to making this strategy work is to have a secure retaliatory force no matter what an enemy might throw at us in a surprise attack. If that enemy knows it will suffer retaliation in kind, and that its attack might therefore be suicidal, there is no sense to attacking in the first place.

Obviously, there are circumstances in which this logic might break down. A nuclear-armed adversary might act irrationally, or make a mistake, despite all the disincentives to a surprise attack that we have sought to fashion. But seven decades after Russia tested its first nuclear device, deterrence is still the best strategy that we have managed to come up with.

Against that backdrop, the key question about ICBMs is whether they contribute to deterrence, or, as some critics allege, undermine it. The weight of informed opinion suggests they bolster deterrence and thus help minimize the possibility of nuclear use.

As the Obama administration’s nuclear posture review found in 2010, “Retaining all three Triad legs will best maintain strategic stability at reasonable cost, while hedging against potential technical problems or vulnerabilities.” The 2010 review called for reducing the number of warheads on each ICBM from three to one, but it found that even taking the ICBM force off alert might undermine stability in a crisis.

Among the vulnerabilities that concerned the Obama security team was that U.S. ballistic-missile subs might become targetable while at sea. In the words of the posture review’s final report, “Today there appears to be no viable near or mid-term threats to the survivability of U.S. [ballistic missile submarines], but such threats—or other technical problems—cannot be ruled out over the long term.”

The same concern applies to the other leg of the triad, bombers equipped with nuclear weapons. There are only three bases in the U.S. where such aircraft are typically stationed, so a surprise attack could potentially destroy almost all of the force on the ground. If the same attack targeted the two bases where ballistic-missile subs are stationed plus the eight or so subs at sea at any given time, a country like Russia or China could wipe out two of the triad’s three legs with a small fraction of its nuclear arsenal.

In that scenario, ICBMs are the main reason for not attacking. China doesn’t have enough long-range warheads to destroy each of 450 silos before weapons launch, and Russia would have to wonder how successful such an assault might be since 99% of ICBMs are ready to launch on short notice at any given time. The readiness rates of the submarine and bomber forces are much lower, which is why ICBMs are said to be the most “responsive” part of the triad.

They are also a lot cheaper to sustain than subs or bombers.

The Trump nuclear posture review conducted in 2018 came to the same conclusion as the Obama review eight years earlier, signaling there is broad consensus on the value of the ICBM force. That is why plans to replace the aging force were begun during the Obama years.

The main difference between the Trump and Obama reviews lay in the much greater emphasis Obama placed on arms control as a way of reducing the threat. Obama’s review actually raised the prospect of a world without nuclear weapons. But it stressed that conditions needed to be right, and that changing the status of ICBMs in the absence of such conditions could make nuclear war more likely.

Joe Biden knows all this, and participated in the deliberations surrounding modernization of the nuclear force. So he is not about to depart from the logic of the 2010 review, which like every other nuclear posture review conducted since the Cold War ended has called for maintaining a triad of nuclear systems—including ICBMs.

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