All the nukes that you can use

I have only one thing to say about Gary Schaub Jr. and James Forsythe Jr.’s op-ed in today’s New York Times, published under the title "An Arsenal We Can All Live With."  

Amen.

Schaub and Forsythe argue that the United States could satisfy all its legitimate security requirements with an arsenal of 311 nuclear warheads, dispersed among bombers, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and ICBM’s. Not a thousand. Not 1,550 plus a few thousand more in reserve. Only 311. That’s all.

Actually, I think that number might still be too large, because you only need a very small handful of nuclear weapons (e.g., maybe a dozen?) to inflict a level of damage that no political leader could tolerate. As former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy famously wrote:

A decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one’s own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable."

American policymakers clearly understand the compelling logic of minimum deterrence, or else they wouldn’t be so worried when states like North Korea or (maybe) Iran seek to join the nuclear club. U.S. leaders recognize that even a handful of nuclear weapons in the hands of a hostile country constrains what we can do to that country (which is of course why some states want to get them in the first place). But if a very small number of weapons can induce such sobriety on our part, why exactly do we need thousands, especially when our conventional forces are already far stronger than any other country on the planet?

Of course, the fact that deterrence isn’t sensitive to the actual number of weapons also implies that having more weapons than we need isn’t that dangerous, provided that you are very, very certain that you won’t lose one, that your large arsenal won’t encourage others with less reliable security arrangements to build up, and provided you have lots of money to pay for an arsenal you don’t really need. But since I like saving money, would prefer that other states either didn’t get nuclear weapons or kept their own arsenals small (and therefore easy to guard), and believe that decreasing the number of warheads in the world is an important step in improving overall nuclear security, I think Schaub and Forsythe’s article should be taken seriously.   

But I doubt it will. Schaub and Forsythe’s analysis is based on careful strategic reasoning, and their conclusions challenge both the bureacratic interests of the professional military and the more atavistic instincts of the body politic. A serious attempt to implement their recommendations would elicit howls of protest from hawkish politicos and pundits, who will maintain that the world’s only superpower also needs the biggest pile of (unusable) bombs in order to preserve its capacity to swagger, even if they can’t actually explain how we would ever use that many weapons or how we derive any practical political benefits from this alleged "superiority." In the hothouse world of political commentary, insisting that "size doesn’t matter" isn’t a winning argument, even when logic and evidence are overwhelmingly on its side.