Guess what? Hostile powers prefer to be able to nuke us with relative ease.
Guess what? Hostile powers prefer to be able to nuke us with relative ease.
S hould we be surprised that nuclear powers that could target the United States for attack don’t like the idea of a U.S. missile defense?
The Wall Street Journal just ran a report headlined, “Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ Riles Nuclear-Armed Foes.”
Trump does a lot of riling, some of gratuitous or misdirected, but if you’re going to upset anyone for any reason, it seems that unsettling nuclear-armed adversaries with your plans to defend yourself from catastrophic attack should be high on the list.
The concerns related in the piece — emanating from Russia, China, and North Korea, as well as domestic opponents of defenses — are a farrago of arms-control cliches that have been part of the missile-defense debate going back decades.
China and Russia teamed up for a joint statement denouncing Golden Dome as “deeply destabilizing.”
You know what’s really destabilizing? Invading neighboring countries. Russia isn’t willing to forswear doing that but is very worried — for the sake of stability, or course — that it might not be able to nuke us as easily a few years from now.
“Stability” has long been a watchword for opponents of defense. The idea here is that deterrence is flawless and the only viable form of nuclear deterrence is mutually assured destruction.
Both premises are false. If deterrence always worked we’d have many fewer wars. But the fact is that one country may misunderstand what another country truly values, and therefore misunderstand what it takes to deter it.
Plus, countries sometimes start a conflict for reasons — national honor, ethnic hatred — that aren’t susceptible to the influence of normal incentives.
For all that we believe that MAD worked brilliantly during the Cold War, if a few things had bounced differently during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we’d all think it was an abject failure that cratered our society.
Missile defense isn’t a substitute for deterrence, but strengthens it. If an adversary can’t be sure that it will penetrate our defenses even if it launches against us, the calculations change. Why would North Korea want to risk everything on a potentially failed attack? Why would China want to escalate in a conflict over Taiwan by hitting Los Angeles, if it can’t be sure it really can hit Los Angeles?
In no other realm do we think it’s a good idea — nay, a necessity — to leave ourselves open to attack. Would we ever consider it a strategic imperative to ensure that the Chinese can destroy our bases on Guam in a conventional attack? And if we don’t want them destroyed by conventional bombing or missiles, why is it more desirable to ensure that they can get nuked?
This only makes sense by the perverse thinking that characterizes arms-control conventional wisdom.
We have a real-life example of how defenses work in the Middle East, where they have clearly been stabilizing. Israel could calibrate its response to large-scale Iranian missile attacks last year — taking its time to respond and not escalating willy-nilly — because integrated Israeli and U.S. defenses largely defeated the assaults. If Iran had caused enormous destruction against a defenseless Israel, the Jewish state would have had little choice but to hit back harder, perhaps leading to a more wide-ranging war.
The argument that defenses are destabilizing is related to the claim that they inevitably cause an arms race.
The North Koreans — always worried about military expenditures crowding out domestic priorities — have registered this concern. They call Iron Dome the “largest arms-buildup plan in history.”
“This missile-defense mirage gives you the illusion you can protect yourself,” Pavel Podvig of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research told the Journal, “but you’re driving all these countries to build all these hundreds and thousands of missiles so you end up in the worst of both worlds.”
We had a test of this proposition in the Cold War. The U.S. and Soviet Union signed the ABM Treaty drastically limiting defenses in 1972. Apparently not realizing that the absence of defenses meant that they didn’t need any more nuclear weapons, the Soviets proceeded full steam ahead with a massive nuclear buildup, peaking in 1986.
On the other hand, when we got out of the ABM Treaty in 2002, Russian nuclear forces declined.
Obviously, factors other than the mere absence or presence of defenses determine the level of nuclear weapons.
If we hope to keep the Chinese from engaging in a nuclear buildup by forswearing defenses, by the way, it’s too late. China is already ramping up drastically, from 200 warheads in 2019 to an expected 1,000 by 2030.
Yet another objection is that the U.S. putting interceptors in space would catalyze our adversaries to “weaponize space.” Again, too late. “Along with maneuverable space vehicles,” the publication DefenseScoop notes, “China has worked to develop anti-satellite missiles and other non-kinetic weapons that can attack U.S. platforms on-orbit. Russia has demonstrated similar counterspace capabilities, such as its 2021 test of an ASAT weapon that destroyed another Russian satellite.”
The report additionally notes, “Moscow is also reportedly developing a nuclear space weapon that could create a massive energy wave and destroy multiple sats.”
Finally, some arms-controllers worry that defenses could create a false sense of security. But is it really better to have no sense of security whatsoever and rest assured that an adversary could destroy U.S. cities? Why?
It’s to be expected that hostile nuclear powers don’t like the idea of the U.S. building defenses against their weapons. What’s shocking is that some people in this country agree with them.