The ugly business of nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction is again raising its head.
Because of multiple warheads, Russia or China might be able to launch a disarming first strike:
Despite our having ~1,400 deployed strategic nuclear warheads, they are postured such that a surprise attack by approximately 70 – 100 Russian or Chinese missiles—a fraction of their total nuclear forces—could soon undermine our "assured" retaliatory capability. ...
But MAD proponents would argue that, even with a surprise attack, the ballistic-missile submarines at sea would survive the initial assault—assuming that emerging Russian or Chinese technologies have not enabled knowledge of the submarine positions and a way to attack them [Note 2]. Those submarines would retaliate with 100s of nuclear warheads, confirming the efficacy of MAD.
Whoa! If MAD worked as advertised, there would have been no disarming first strike!
And I worry that non-nuclear precision conventional warheads could take out a number of American nuclear targets, including bombers and SSBNs in bases.
Still, postulating a successful enemy first strike and then using that hypothetical to "prove" our SSBN's at sea won't deter an enemy seems logically suspect, no?
It might be interesting to game whether an American response consisting of conventional precision weapons targeting enemy nuclear sites with only a token nuclear retaliation could work to degrade enemy nuclear arsenals while deterring an enemy escalation to nuking our cities with our surviving SSBNs.
And how do we maintain that minimal deterrence when the SSBNs need to rotate crews and replenish?
I'm not sure what we need to do. The vulnerability of our ICBMs, bombers at bases, and SSBNs in port is nothing new. We should brush up on our Cold War debates about that to refresh our strategic thinking.
But being able to defend our space-based surveillance and refusing to make a "no first use" pledge about nuclear weapons use would be a start.
Adjust your pucker factor accordingly and, as always, have a super sparkly day.
