Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 11. April 2009 / Time Line April 11, 2009
Version 3.010. April 2009, 12. April 2009
04/11/2009
New Report Recommends Nuclear Policy on the Path Toward Nuclear
Disarmament
FAS and NRDC Chart Minimal Deterrent Nuclear Mission
http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/doctrine/targeting.pdf
In Prague, President
Barack Obama called for a world without nuclear weapons. Today,
the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and the Natural
Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report calling for
fundamental changes to U.S. nuclear war planning, a vital
prerequisite if smaller nuclear arsenals are to be achieved.
The study From Counterforce to Minimal Deterrence: A New Nuclear
Policy on the Path Toward Eliminating Nuclear Weapons recommends
abandoning the decades-old "counterforce" doctrine and replacing it
with a new and much less ambitious targeting policy the authors
call Minimal Deterrence.
Global Security Newswire reported last week that Department of
Defense officials have concluded that significant reductions to the
nuclear arsenal cannot be made unless President Barak Obama scales
back the nation's strategic war plan. The FAS/NRDC report presents
a plan for how to do that.
The last time outdated nuclear guidance stood in the way of nuclear
cuts was in 1997, when then President Clinton had to change
President Reagan's 17-year old guidance to enable U.S. Strategic
Command (STRATCOM) to go to the START-III force level that the Bush
administration subsequently adopted as the Moscow Treaty force
level. The series of STRATCOM force structure studies examining
lower force levels is described in The Matrix of Deterrence.
Executive Summary
To realize President Barack Obama's vision of "dramatic reductions"
in the number of nuclear weapons, stopping development of new
nuclear weapons, taking nuclear weapons off alert, and pursuing the
goal of a world without nuclear weapons, radical changes are needed
in the four types of U.S. policies that govern nuclear weapons:
declaratory, acquisition, deployment, and employment.
This report largely concerns itself with employment policy, that
is, how the United States actually plans for the use of nuclear
weapons, and argues that there should be fundamental changes to the
current war plans and the process of how these are formulated and
implemented. The logic, content, and procedures of the current
employment policy are relics of the Cold War and, if not changed,
will hinder the hoped-for deep cuts to the nuclear stockpile and
the longer term goal of elimination.
This report argues that, as long as the United States continues
these nuclear missions unjustifiably held over from the Cold War,
nuclear weapons will contribute more to the nation's and the
world's insecurity than they contribute to their security. And
without those Cold War justifications, there is only one job left
for nuclear weapons: to deter the use of nuclear weapons. For much
of the Cold War - at least from the early 1960s - the dominant
mission for U.S. strategic weapons has been counterforce, that is,
the attack of military, mostly nuclear, targets and the enemy's
leadership. The requirements for the counterforce mission
perpetuate the most dangerous characteristics of nuclear forces,
with weapons kept at high levels of alert, ready to launch upon
warning of an enemy attack, and able to preemptively attack enemy
forces.
This mission is no longer needed but it still exists because the
current core policy guidance and directives that are issued to the
combatant commanders are little different from their Cold War
predecessors. General Kevin Chilton, head of U.S. Strategic Command
(STRATCOM), recently took issue with President Obama's
characterization of U.S. nuclear weapons being on "hair-trigger
alert" but made our case for us by saying, "The alert postures that
we are in today are appropriate, given our strategy and guidance
and policy." [Emphasis added.] That is exactly right and,
therefore, if President Obama wants General Chilton to do something
different, he will have to provide the commander of U.S. nuclear
forces with different guidance and directives.
The counterforce mission, and all that goes with it, should be
explicitly and publicly abandoned and replaced with a much less
ambitious and qualitatively different doctrine. A new "minimal
deterrence" mission will make retaliation after nuclear attack the
sole mission for nuclear weapons. We believe that adopting this
doctrine is an important step on the path to nuclear abolition
because nuclear retaliation is the one mission for nuclear weapons
that reduces the salience of nuclear weapons; it is the
self-canceling mission. With just this one mission, the United
States can have far fewer nuclear forces to use against a different
set of targets. Almost all of the "requirements" for nuclear
weapons' performance were established during the Cold War and
derive from the counterforce mission. Under a minimal deterrence
doctrine, appropriate needs for reliability, accuracy, response
time, and all other performance characteristics, can be reevaluated
and loosened.
In this analysis, we consider in detail an attack on a
representative set of targets that might be appropriate under a
minimal deterrence doctrine, including power plants and oil and
metal refineries. We find that, even when carefully choosing
targets to avoid cities, attack with a dozen typical nuclear
weapons can result in more than a million casualties, although
using far less powerful weapons can substantially reduce that
number. Nuclear weapons are so destructive that much smaller
forces, of initially 1,000 warheads, and later a few hundred
warheads, are more than adequate to serve as a deterrent against
anyone unwise enough to attack the United States with nuclear
weapons.
The president will need to maintain keen oversight to insure that
the new guidance is being carried out faithfully. We describe the
many layers of bureaucracy between the president and those who
develop the nuts-and-bolts plans for nuclear weapons employment to
show how easily a president's intentions can be co-opted and
diffused. We finally offer examples of what a presidential
directive might look like.
 |
 |