A Democratic fundraising event is not the most appropriate place for a president of the United States to muse out loud about the potential of nuclear Armageddon, but Joe Biden did it at a party fundraiser in New York City the other night.
If the talk of Armageddon is overwrought, there is no doubt that we have entered a second nuclear age with the threat of the use of nuclear weapons at its highest since the Cold War.
As Russia continues to get pushed back from what it maintains of its sovereign territory in Ukraine and the domestic politics of the war turn against Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator might well calculate that a nuclear test, demonstration explosion, or use of a tactical weapon on the battlefield is his best way to try to change the trajectory of a conflict that he’s losing, and losing badly.
Rather than talking loosely about the worst-case scenarios with Democratic donors, Biden should explain to the nation the dangers and how we intend to deter Putin from going down this route (at the very least, we should make it clear that if Putin escalates in this way, any brake on the kinds and quantity of matériel we are providing Ukrainians will be jettisoned immediately and that we aren’t taking direct NATO intervention or a nuclear response off the table).
Biden should also give up his long-standing opposition to more robust U.S. missile defenses. Indeed, it is insane that a president of the United States is talking about nuclear Armageddon and we aren’t engaged in a crash program to fortify our defenses. If the world has gotten more dangerous — and it has — we should respond accordingly. A stepped-up effort wouldn’t help us much in the current crisis, but it would make a difference in responding to an inevitable future threat from Russia, North Korea, or China.
We also shouldn’t rely on the belief that deterrence is enough. Yes, it worked during the Cold War, but we can’t know how much sheer luck played a role and whether, if circumstances had been a little different or if the contest with the Soviets had been prolonged, it would have failed. Regardless, missile defense enhances deterrence. If a foreign leader knows that he might take all the risk of firing a nuclear weapon at us, and the missile might not even make it through to its target, it is bound to affect his calculations.
And, of course, defense is a backstop against the failure of deterrence. A successful intercept would give a U.S. president flexibility and time in determining a response to an attempted strike on the homeland or U.S. assets, rather than forcing an immediate response in kind. Israeli leaders have found that Iron Dome, its highly effective defense system, has had exactly this sort of welcome effect on its decision-making.
An argument against missile defense going back to Ronald Reagan has been that it is a technological fantasy. We long ago established that a bullet can hit a bullet, though. There is no reason that we shouldn’t immediately begin to acquire more of our current interceptors for all of our systems — whether for the Patriot, a land-based mobile system designed to intercept tactical missiles; the Navy’s sea-based AEGIS system; the land-mobile Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD); or our Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) based in Alaska and California. A key lesson of the Ukraine war is that protracted conflicts consume missiles more quickly than they can be produced during wartime, and we need to heed it.
Only the GMD is specifically designed to defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles. We should accelerate the development of new interceptors and kill vehicles for it, and expand the number of sites. We should obviously stop trying to reassure Russia that our defenses aren’t aimed at stopping its missiles, a Democratic obsession over the years that has curtailed our defenses. And we should speed up the work to enhance AEGIS and THAAD so these systems, designed for regional threats, can defend more substantially against intercontinental missiles.
Ultimately, if we are going to have any hope of stopping or significantly degrading a major nuclear attack on the United States, we need to develop a space-based defense. This might seem the stuff of science fiction, but the cost of launching satellites has drastically diminished thanks to the work of Elon Musk, and you might be reading this editorial on a device that would have seemed impossible 30 years ago. We need sensors in space to better track launches for our current systems and should work in earnest on directed-energy lasers to take out intercontinental missiles in space. The goal should be a truly layered defense with the capability to take multiple shots at an incoming missile.
All this would be expensive, but not nearly as costly as one day losing an American city.