Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

36th Annual IFPA-Fletcher Conference on
National Security and Policy
Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Forces in 21st-Century Deterrence: Implementing the New Triad

December 14-15, 2005
Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel
Washington, D.C.

December 14 - Session 4

Address by Ms. Elaine Bunn, Director, Future Strategic Concepts Program, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University

Thanks, Bob. There were a number of questions that Bob Pfaltzgraff put before this panel, but I have chosen to selectively address just one which deals with nonproliferation and our buddies; that is, how do we keep our friends and allies from going nuclear, and what's the role of the New Triad in insuring that?

I do adhere to this logic that you’ve heard already, that the New Triad is important for reassuring allies that they don’t need to—That we’ll come to their defense and they don’t need to be compelled to get their own nuclear weapons. And I even more specifically think that our nuclear capabilities contribute to that assurance. And I guess I’ve been on too many nuclear posture reviews with about half the people on this panel to think differently.

But you can only take this line of argument so far. The criterion of assuring allies tells you little to nothing about the size or composition of the nuclear capabilities the U.S. should have. I think it’s an exercise in false precision to say that unless we have robust nuclear penetrator or unless we go forward with reliable replacement warhead, allies will no longer be assured. Or unless we keep a certain number of nuclear weapons, fill in the blank on your favorite number, allies will no longer be assured.

I'm not saying that it’s impossible that allies could get to that point where they are insufficiently reassured by our nuclear force. We’ve seen it before in the late ‘70s when West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt said SS20s will decouple the U.S. nuclear force from defense of Europe and that ended up with a decision to deploy their precise number of Pershing 2s and ground launch cruise missiles, 108 and 464 as I recall, very precise numbers. And T-LAM (?) man off the coast was not going to be reassuring enough. So there have been times in history where allies did care greatly about the precise composition, disposition of our nuclear force. But I don't think that's where we are at this point in our history and I see no evidence that allies or friends are insufficiently reassured by our nuclear arsenal.

We could talk them into it, though, by denigrating our own capability. [laughter] In particular, one of my personal pet peeves, I see talk of U.S. being self deterred. You’ve all heard it. Usually put forward by those who most support no nuclear weapons as being counterproductive from both an assurance and a deterrence standpoint. I understand, I realize this is a catch 22 because in a democracy, you won’t get changes that you may think you need unless you have this public examination. But unless you’re sure you're going to be able to fill the gaps that you identify, I do think you're undermining assurance and deterrence by harping on gaps.

With regard to the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, I think that's also hard to calibrate based on assurance of allies. For assurance, you certainly need something more than zero. But for most people, debate is not really between something and nothing. There probably is some minimum number below which we don’t want to go, but I don’t think that we’ve methodically examined with allies or friends their perception of where that line is, whether it’s as high as the criterion implied in the nuclear posture review, that is second to none, is another matter. And even that criterion is not really explicit to whether it’s in terms of quantity or quality. If it’s quantity, and if one includes non-strategic nuclear forces, a term I also find oxymoronic, the U.S. may already be surpassed and if you consider the large number of Russian NSNF. So don’t think it’s strictly about quantity.

If it’s in terms of quality, I don't know how you measure that. I would agree that to contribute to assurance, the U.S. nuclear force need to be seen by the assurees as safe, reliable and effective. But I do think that self denigration of our own nuclear capability probably does more to undermine assurance of allies than any lack of capability. I think that if we are confident about it that they will be, too.

The larger point, though, is I think it’s not just nuclear weapons that assure allies, mitigate against their acquiring their own WMD. It’s the larger New Triad, to be sure, we’ve heard about that as well, about how that contributes so I won’t go into that. But I think assurance is even larger than just the New Triad. There's a global force posture, our forward deployments, our ability to get wherever we need to be. And particularly, the overall security relationship with the ally or friend in question.

I’ve spent some time this fall in Asia working with our INSS regional team on a project on deterrence looking broadly at the question of how or if the thinking about deterrence among our friends and allies in Asia is evolving, is it evolving along the same lines as ours is or not? How are they thinking about offense and defense? Capabilities needed to underpin deterrence, and in particular whether they see the need for their own strike capabilities. Admittedly, conventional strike capabilities are what we’re exploring, but I think it does give you some insights into how assured allies and friends are or are not.

In Japan, when we were there, the experts, both in and out of government, expressed a lot of confidence in U.S. security guarantees, even in the face of North Korea and nuclear weapons and PRC conventional and nuclear missile modernization. For Japan, though, the presence of our troops and the strength of the overall U.S./Japan alliance which is stronger than at any time in recent memory, I think, seems to have much more to do with Japan being assured than do the specifics of our nuclear capability. In our talks, U.S. nuclear capability was often not mentioned at all by our Japanese interlocutors or mentioned almost as an after thought. Oh yeah, there's nuclear deterrence in the background there. And a lot of times, it was only when we raised the issue and asked them about it.

I don’t see much interest, there is some talk in Japan about acquiring a limited conventional strike capability, as evident in their 2003 Diet debate about whether or not to have conventional Tomahawk capability. But that really does not appear to be a mainstream view. Most Japanese experts endorse a division of labor where the U.S. continues to have responsibility for strike capabilities, both conventional and nuclear, and Japan contributes other capabilities, including missile defense, which they're moving forward on. In fact, with their Aegis that they're moving forward on, it almost seems to be the official solution in Japan and there's a disinclination to consider other ways to reinforce their own deterrence capabilities.

Fast forward to trip to Taiwan, very different situation in that they are not formal treaty allies like Japan and South Korea. Ambiguity is inherent in the U.S. position with our One China policy, not supporting Taiwan independence, opposing unilateral changes to the status quo by either side, particularly if it involves use of force. Balancing the commitments of the joint communiqués and the Taiwan Relations Act, it’s ambiguous to the point that whether or not the U.S. would intervene would depend on the particular situation. That means that Taiwan cannot have the same kind of reassurance that Japan and South Korea do. And in fact, there has been some discussion in Taiwan about needing conventional strike, or as they would put it, counterstrike capability. In May, Taiwan’s defense minister said that Taiwan—He told reporters that Taiwan was developing long range strategic missiles. In our discussions, the expert said, “No, no, he misspoke because 600 kilometer missiles are not long range.” Which—

But my point is there's much more support in Taiwan for having their own conventional deterrent or counter strike capability than in Japan.

[End of disc}

Ms. Bunn: --and whether we’d be there in time than it did with our nuclear capabilities except as a general background capability or with other specific New Triad capabilities.

Just want to end by coming back to what some other folks had said about looking more at measures of effectiveness, looking at output and effects rather than inputs, Bill Schneider talked about that, Ron Lehman talked about it, for assurance, the measure of effectiveness, at least in the context that we’re discussing on this panel, is that allies don’t decide to acquire them own WMD. But it’s hard to know what effect—That's the outcome you want. What it’s hard to know, what inputs lead to there. It’s hard to know the cause and effect. Do they not go down that path because they’re reassured by the U.S. and all the factors that we’ve talked about before? Or were they dissuaded from going down the WMD path because of the cost, economic, opportunity costs, potential damage to security relations with the U.S.? And basically, international opprobrium that would follow.

It’s rather like deterrence in that the real measure of effectiveness is that nothing happens, and it’s hard to know why nothing happened. There are some other analogies between deterrence and assurance that I don't think have been fully explored. I was writing a paper for the QDR process on deterrence and how do we think about roles, missions and organizations for it. So I went back and read, reviewed national security strategy, the national defense strategy, the national military strategy, the joint operating concept for strategic deterrence, all these current USG documents that use the term deterrence. And I discovered we use it inconsistently and very differently in these serious documents in that sometimes it’s very broad and sometimes it’s very narrow regarding both what's being deterred and what should be included in the set of capabilities needed for deterrence. The broadest interpretation that was in a number of the strategy and guidance documents speak to the mission of deterring all aggression by all actors, you’ve heard them laid out today, and includes—The capabilities we included are much of what the Department of Defense does. Force presence, force projection, homeland defense, stability ops, and sometimes things that other parts of the USG do as well. In other words, it’s every move we make, every step we take, that's what deterrence is.

Then there's a narrow interpretation in some of these documents that really is about deterring the use of weapons of mass destruction and the capabilities that they point to are ones in the New Triad, the ones that we’ve been talking about today. So if we really aren’t very consistent when we use the term deterrence, even in current USG documents, and the same can be said about assurance. I'm not sure that we’ve thought carefully about what we want to assure allies about and what's needed to do it.

In any event, we’ve talked a lot about tailoring deterrence, you heard Ryan Henry and Brian Green talk about that. But I think we really do need to tailor assurance as well. We need to figure out what it is that we need to reassure specific allies in specific situations. A key difference between assurance and deterrence is that you really can’t go ask your adversaries, “What will it take to deter you?” Or if you do, I'm not sure you should believe the answer. But with our allies and our friends, we can go and ask them what reassures them and what factors are most important to them and their remaining non-nuclear. Thanks.

Question and Answer

Audience: Ash, I think there's a difference between North Korea having one or two nuclear weapons and 10 or 15 nuclear weapons because in the second case, they’d be more willing to transfer that. Could you, in the context of a course of strategy or a carrot strategy, how would you—Can you sketch out some of your thoughts about how you would engage to try to discourage transfer?

The second, with regard to Elaine, I hesitate to push back on Elaine a little bit because when I do, 99 times out of 100, she’s right and I'm wrong. [laughter] But with regard to RRW, I’d like to argue that there’d be a little bit more—There could be an important element of assurance in connection with that program. And the reason why I say that is the laboratory directors have told us their concerns about our ability, not over the next year or two or three, but over the next two or three decades, about our ability to sort of assure the safety and reliability of this stockpile developed under the Cold War under fairly stringent military requirements. And therefore, they’ve recommended that we proceed on this RRW approach as a risk management tool to help us understand whether it’s feasible to move on this new path as a hedge against the possibility that their concerns bear out over two or three decades. I think this can be an important element of assurance in the context, not necessarily over the next two or three years, but over the five, ten, fifteen years. So I’d like your thoughts on that a little bit.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Very good. Elaine, you need no introduction, do you?

Ms. Bunn: Well, not to John anyway because we used to work together. I won’t push back too hard on what you said about RRW. My point was not that we—I did grant you that for assurees to be assured, they need to see our nuclear forces being safe, reliable and effective. But we are confident in it, that they will be. That was my point. If we are not, and if you say we wouldn’t be unless we make some changes, then okay, then maybe you do need to do it and maybe it does have an effect on assurance. But I was just saying assuring allies is not a criterion that tells us exactly what changes to make. You may do it for other reasons, and then okay, over time when allies understand that that's why we did it, so that we could be confident in a safe, reliable, effective deterrent and it does help assurance.