PRESENT AT THE DESTRUCTION

For almost half a century, the world's most powerful nuclear states have
been locked in a military stalemate known as mutual assured destruction
(MAD). By the early 1960s, the nuclear arsenals of the United States and
the Soviet Union had grown so large and sophisticated that neither country
could entirely destroy the other's retaliatory force by launching first,
even with a surprise attack. Starting a nuclear war was therefore
tantamount to committing suicide.

During the Cold War, many scholars and policy analysts believed that MAD
made the world relatively stable and peaceful because it induced great
caution in international politics, discouraged the use of nuclear threats
to resolve disputes, and generally restrained the superpowers' behavior.
(Revealingly, the last intense nuclear standoff, the 1962 Cuban missile
crisis, occurred at the dawn of the era of MAD.) Because of the nuclear
stalemate, the optimists argued, the era of intentional great-power wars
had ended. Critics of MAD, however, argued that it prevented not
great-power war but the rolling back of the power and influence of a
dangerously expansionist and totalitarian Soviet Union. From that
perspective, MAD prolonged the life of an evil empire.

This debate may now seem like ancient history, but it is actually more
relevant than ever -- because the age of MAD is nearing an end. Today, for
the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of
attaining nuclear primacy. It will probably soon be possible for the United
States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a
first strike. This dramatic shift in the nuclear balance of power stems
from a series of improvements in the United States' nuclear systems, the
precipitous decline of Russia's arsenal, and the glacial pace of
modernization of China's nuclear forces. Unless Washington's policies
change or Moscow and Beijing take steps to increase the size and readiness
of their forces, Russia and China -- and the rest of the world -- will live
in the shadow of U.S. nuclear primacy for many years to come.

One's views on the implications of this change will depend on one's
theoretical perspective. Hawks, who believe that the United States is a
benevolent force in the world, will welcome the new nuclear era because
they trust that U.S. dominance in both conventional and nuclear weapons
will help deter aggression by other countries. For example, as U.S. nuclear
primacy grows, China's leaders may act more cautiously on issues such as
Taiwan, realizing that their vulnerable nuclear forces will not deter U.S.
intervention -- and that Chinese nuclear threats could invite a U.S. strike
on Beijing's arsenal. But doves, who oppose using nuclear threats to coerce
other states and fear an emboldened and unconstrained United States, will
worry. Nuclear primacy might lure Washington into more aggressive behavior,
they argue, especially when combined with U.S. dominance in so many other
dimensions of national power. Finally, a third group -- owls, who worry
about the possibility of inadvertent conflict -- will fret that U.S.
nuclear primacy could prompt other nuclear powers to adopt strategic
postures, such as by giving control of nuclear weapons to lower-level
commanders, that would make an unauthorized nuclear strike more likely --
thereby creating what strategic theorists call "crisis instability."

ARSENAL OF A DEMOCRACY

For 50 years, the Pentagon's war planners have structured the U.S. nuclear
arsenal according to the goal of deterring a nuclear attack on the United
States and, if necessary, winning a nuclear war by launching a preemptive
strike that would destroy an enemy's nuclear forces. For these purposes,
the United States relies on a nuclear triad comprising strategic bombers,
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and
ballistic-missile-launching submarines (known as SSBNs). The triad reduces
the odds that an enemy could destroy all U.S. nuclear forces in a single
strike, even in a surprise attack, ensuring that the United States would be
able to launch a devastating response. Such retaliation would only have to
be able to destroy a large enough portion of the attacker's cities and
industry to deter an attack in the first place. The same nuclear triad,
however, could be used in an offensive attack against an adversary's
nuclear forces. Stealth bombers might slip past enemy radar, submarines
could fire their missiles from near the enemy's shore and so give the
enemy's leaders almost no time to respond, and highly accurate land-based
missiles could destroy even hardened silos that have been reinforced
against attack and other targets that require a direct hit. The ability to
destroy all of an adversary's nuclear forces, eliminating the possibility
of a retaliatory strike, is known as a first-strike capability, or nuclear
primacy.

The United States derived immense strategic benefits from its nuclear
primacy during the early years of the Cold War, in terms of both
crisis-bargaining advantages vis-à-vis the Soviet Union (for example, in
the case of Berlin in the late 1950s and early 1960s) and planning for war
against the Red Army in Europe. If the Soviets had invaded Western Europe
in the 1950s, the United States intended to win World War III by
immediately launching a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, its
Eastern European clients, and its Chinese ally. These plans were not the
concoctions of midlevel Pentagon bureaucrats; they were approved by the
highest level of the U.S. government.

U.S. nuclear primacy waned in the early 1960s, as the Soviets developed the
capability to carry out a retaliatory second strike. With this development
came the onset of MAD. Washington abandoned its strategy of a preemptive
nuclear strike, but for the remainder of the Cold War, it struggled to
escape MAD and reestablish its nuclear dominance. It expanded its nuclear
arsenal, continuously improved the accuracy and the lethality of its
weapons aimed at Soviet nuclear arms, targeted Soviet command-and-control
systems, invested in missile-defense shields, sent attack submarines to
trail Soviet SSBNs, and built increasingly accurate multiwarhead land- and
submarine-launched ballistic missiles as well as stealth bombers and
stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles. Equally unhappy with MAD, the
Soviet Union also built a massive arsenal in the hope of gaining nuclear
superiority. Neither side came close to gaining a first-strike capability,
but it would be a mistake to dismiss the arms race as entirely irrational:
both superpowers were well aware of the benefits of nuclear primacy, and
neither was willing to risk falling behind.

Since the Cold War's end, the U.S. nuclear arsenal has significantly
improved. The United States has replaced the ballistic missiles on its
submarines with the substantially more accurate Trident II D-5 missiles,
many of which carry new, larger-yield warheads. The U.S. Navy has shifted a
greater proportion of its SSBNs to the Pacific so that they can patrol near
the Chinese coast or in the blind spot of Russia's early warning radar
network. The U.S. Air Force has finished equipping its B-52 bombers with
nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which are probably invisible to Russian and
Chinese air-defense radar. And the air force has also enhanced the avionics
on its B-2 stealth bombers to permit them to fly at extremely low altitudes
in order to avoid even the most sophisticated radar. Finally, although the
air force finished dismantling its highly lethal MX missiles in 2005 to
comply with arms control agreements, it is significantly improving its
remaining ICBMs by installing the MX's high-yield warheads and advanced
reentry vehicles on Minuteman ICBMs, and it has upgraded the Minuteman's
guidance systems to match the MX's accuracy.

IMBALANCE OF TERROR

Even as the United States' nuclear forces have grown stronger since the end
of the Cold War, Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal has sharply
deteriorated. Russia has 39 percent fewer long-range bombers, 58 percent
fewer ICBMs, and 80 percent fewer SSBNs than the Soviet Union fielded
during its last days. The true extent of the Russian arsenal's decay,
however, is much greater than these cuts suggest. What nuclear forces
Russia retains are hardly ready for use. Russia's strategic bombers, now
located at only two bases and thus vulnerable to a surprise attack, rarely
conduct training exercises, and their warheads are stored off-base. Over 80
percent of Russia's silo-based ICBMs have exceeded their original service
lives, and plans to replace them with new missiles have been stymied by
failed tests and low rates of production. Russia's mobile ICBMs rarely
patrol, and although they could fire their missiles from inside their bases
if given sufficient warning of an attack, it appears unlikely that they
would have the time to do so.

The third leg of Russia's nuclear triad has weakened the most. Since 2000,
Russia's SSBNs have conducted approximately two patrols per year, down from
60 in 1990. (By contrast, the U.S. SSBN patrol rate today is about 40 per
year.) Most of the time, all nine of Russia's ballistic missile submarines
are sitting in port, where they make easy targets. Moreover, submarines
require well-trained crews to be effective. Operating a ballistic missile
submarine -- and silently coordinating its operations with surface ships
and attack submarines to evade an enemy's forces -- is not simple. Without
frequent patrols, the skills of Russian submariners, like the submarines
themselves, are decaying. Revealingly, a 2004 test (attended by President
Vladimir Putin) of several submarine-launched ballistic missiles was a
total fiasco: all either failed to launch or veered off course. The fact
that there were similar failures in the summer and fall of 2005 completes
this unflattering picture of Russia's nuclear forces.

Compounding these problems, Russia's early warning system is a mess.
Neither Soviet nor Russian satellites have ever been capable of reliably
detecting missiles launched from U.S. submarines. (In a recent public
statement, a top Russian general described his country's early warning
satellite constellation as "hopelessly outdated.") Russian commanders
instead rely on ground-based radar systems to detect incoming warheads from
submarine-launched missiles. But the radar network has a gaping hole in its
coverage that lies to the east of the country, toward the Pacific Ocean. If
U.S. submarines were to fire missiles from areas in the Pacific, Russian
leaders probably would not know of the attack until the warheads detonated.
Russia's radar coverage of some areas in the North Atlantic is also spotty,
providing only a few minutes of warning before the impact of
submarine-launched warheads.

Moscow could try to reduce its vulnerability by finding the money to keep
its submarines and mobile missiles dispersed. But that would be only a
short-term fix. Russia has already extended the service life of its aging
mobile ICBMs, something that it cannot do indefinitely, and its efforts to
deploy new strategic weapons continue to flounder. The Russian navy's plan
to launch a new class of ballistic missile submarines has fallen far behind
schedule. It is now highly likely that not a single new submarine will be
operational before 2008, and it is likely that none will be deployed until
later.

Even as Russia's nuclear forces deteriorate, the United States is improving
its ability to track submarines and mobile missiles, further eroding
Russian military leaders' confidence in Russia's nuclear deterrent. (As
early as 1998, these leaders publicly expressed doubts about the ability of
Russia's ballistic missile submarines to evade U.S. detection.) Moreover,
Moscow has announced plans to reduce its land-based ICBM force by another
35 percent by 2010; outside experts predict that the actual cuts will slice
50 to 75 percent off the current force, possibly leaving Russia with as few
as 150 ICBMs by the end of the decade, down from its 1990 level of almost
1,300 missiles. The more Russia's nuclear arsenal shrinks, the easier it
will become for the United States to carry out a first strike.

To determine how much the nuclear balance has changed since the Cold War,
we ran a computer model of a hypothetical U.S. attack on Russia's nuclear
arsenal using the standard unclassified formulas that defense analysts have
used for decades. We assigned U.S. nuclear warheads to Russian targets on
the basis of two criteria: the most accurate weapons were aimed at the
hardest targets, and the fastest-arriving weapons at the Russian forces
that can react most quickly. Because Russia is essentially blind to a
submarine attack from the Pacific and would have great difficulty detecting
the approach of low-flying stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, we
targeted each Russian weapon system with at least one submarine-based
warhead or cruise missile. An attack organized in this manner would give
Russian leaders virtually no warning.

This simple plan is presumably less effective than Washington's actual
strategy, which the U.S. government has spent decades perfecting. The real
U.S. war plan may call for first targeting Russia's command and control,
sabotaging Russia's radar stations, or taking other preemptive measures --
all of which would make the actual U.S. force far more lethal than our
model assumes.

According to our model, such a simplified surprise attack would have a good
chance of destroying every Russian bomber base, submarine, and ICBM. [See
Footnote #1] This finding is not based on best-case assumptions or an
unrealistic scenario in which U.S. missiles perform perfectly and the
warheads hit their targets without fail. Rather, we used standard
assumptions to estimate the likely inaccuracy and unreliability of U.S.
weapons systems. Moreover, our model indicates that all of Russia's
strategic nuclear arsenal would still be destroyed even if U.S. weapons
were 20 percent less accurate than we assumed, or if U.S. weapons were only
70 percent reliable, or if Russian ICBM silos were 50 percent "harder"
(more reinforced, and hence more resistant to attack) than we expected. (Of
course, the unclassified estimates we used may understate the capabilities
of U.S. forces, making an attack even more likely to succeed.)

To be clear, this does not mean that a first strike by the United States
would be guaranteed to work in reality; such an attack would entail many
uncertainties. Nor, of course, does it mean that such a first strike is
likely. But what our analysis suggests is profound: Russia's leaders can no
longer count on a survivable nuclear deterrent. And unless they reverse
course rapidly, Russia's vulnerability will only increase over time.

China's nuclear arsenal is even more vulnerable to a U.S. attack. A U.S.
first strike could succeed whether it was launched as a surprise or in the
midst of a crisis during a Chinese alert. China has a limited strategic
nuclear arsenal. The People's Liberation Army currently possesses no modern
SSBNs or long-range bombers. Its naval arm used to have two ballistic
missile submarines, but one sank, and the other, which had such poor
capabilities that it never left Chinese waters, is no longer operational.
China's medium-range bomber force is similarly unimpressive: the bombers
are obsolete and vulnerable to attack. According to unclassified U.S.
government assessments, China's entire intercontinental nuclear arsenal
consists of 18 stationary single-warhead ICBMs. These are not ready to
launch on warning: their warheads are kept in storage and the missiles
themselves are unfueled. (China's ICBMs use liquid fuel, which corrodes the
missiles after 24 hours. Fueling them is estimated to take two hours.) The
lack of an advanced early warning system adds to the vulnerability of the
ICBMs. It appears that China would have no warning at all of a U.S.
submarine-launched missile attack or a strike using hundreds of stealthy
nuclear-armed cruise missiles.

Many sources claim that China is attempting to reduce the vulnerability of
its ICBMs by building decoy silos. But decoys cannot provide a firm basis
for deterrence. It would take close to a thousand fake silos to make a U.S.
first strike on China as difficult as an attack on Russia, and no available
information on China's nuclear forces suggests the existence of massive
fields of decoys. And even if China built them, its commanders would always
wonder whether U.S. sensors could distinguish real silos from fake ones.

Despite much talk about China's military modernization, the odds that
Beijing will acquire a survivable nuclear deterrent in the next decade are
slim. China's modernization efforts have focused on conventional forces,
and the country's progress on nuclear modernization has accordingly been
slow. Since the mid-1980s, China has been trying to develop a new missile
for its future ballistic missile submarine as well as mobile ICBMs (the
DF-31 and longer-range DF-31A) to replace its current ICBM force. The U.S.
Defense Department predicts that China may deploy DF-31s in a few years,
although the forecast should be treated skeptically: U.S. intelligence has
been announcing the missile's imminent deployment for decades.

Even when they are eventually fielded, the DF-31s are unlikely to
significantly reduce China's vulnerability. The missiles' limited range,
estimated to be only 8,000 kilometers (4,970 miles), greatly restricts the
area in which they can be hidden, reducing the difficulty of searching for
them. The DF-31s could hit the contiguous United States only if they were
deployed in China's far northeastern corner, principally in Heilongjiang
Province, near the Russian-North Korean border. But Heilongjiang is
mountainous, and so the missiles might be deployable only along a few
hundred kilometers of good road or in a small plain in the center of the
province. Such restrictions increase the missiles' vulnerability and raise
questions about whether they are even intended to target the U.S. homeland
or whether they will be aimed at targets in Russia and Asia.

Given the history of China's slow-motion nuclear modernization, it is
doubtful that a Chinese second-strike force will materialize anytime soon.
The United States has a first-strike capability against China today and
should be able to maintain it for a decade or more.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN?

Is the United States intentionally pursuing nuclear primacy? Or is primacy
an unintended byproduct of intra-Pentagon competition for budget share or
of programs designed to counter new threats from terrorists and so-called
rogue states? Motivations are always hard to pin down, but the weight of
the evidence suggests that Washington is, in fact, deliberately seeking
nuclear primacy. For one thing, U.S. leaders have always aspired to this
goal. And the nature of the changes to the current arsenal and official
rhetoric and policies support this conclusion.

The improvements to the U.S. nuclear arsenal offer evidence that the United
States is actively seeking primacy. The navy, for example, is upgrading the
fuse on the W-76 nuclear warhead, which sits atop most U.S.
submarine-launched missiles. Currently, the warheads can be detonated only
as air bursts well above ground, but the new fuse will also permit ground
bursts (detonations at or very near ground level), which are ideal for
attacking very hard targets such as ICBM silos. Another navy research
program seeks to improve dramatically the accuracy of its
submarine-launched missiles (already among the most accurate in the world).
Even if these efforts fall short of their goals, any refinement in accuracy
combined with the ground-burst fuses will multiply the missiles' lethality.
Such improvements only make sense if the missiles are meant to destroy a
large number of hard targets. And given that B-2s are already very stealthy
aircraft, it is difficult to see how the air force could justify the
increased risk of crashing them into the ground by having them fly at very
low altitudes in order to avoid radar detection -- unless their mission is
to penetrate a highly sophisticated air defense network such as Russia's
or, perhaps in the future, China's.

During the Cold War, one explanation for the development of the nuclear
arms race was that the rival military services' competition for budget
share drove them to build ever more nuclear weapons. But the United States
today is not achieving primacy by buying big-ticket platforms such as new
SSBNs, bombers, or ICBMs. Current modernization programs involve
incremental improvements to existing systems. The recycling of warheads and
reentry vehicles from the air force's retired MX missiles (there are even
reports that extra MX warheads may be put on navy submarine-launched
missiles) is the sort of efficient use of resources that does not fit a
theory based on parochial competition for increased funding. Rather than
reflect organizational resource battles, these steps look like a
coordinated set of programs to enhance the United States' nuclear
first-strike capabilities.

Some may wonder whether U.S. nuclear modernization efforts are actually
designed with terrorists or rogue states in mind. Given the United States'
ongoing war on terror, and the continuing U.S. interest in destroying
deeply buried bunkers (reflected in the Bush administration's efforts to
develop new nuclear weapons to destroy underground targets), one might
assume that the W-76 upgrades are designed to be used against targets such
as rogue states' arsenals of weapons of mass destruction or terrorists
holed up in caves. But this explanation does not add up. The United States
already has more than a thousand nuclear warheads capable of attacking
bunkers or caves. If the United States' nuclear modernization were really
aimed at rogue states or terrorists, the country's nuclear force would not
need the additional thousand ground-burst warheads it will gain from the
W-76 modernization program. The current and future U.S. nuclear force, in
other words, seems designed to carry out a preemptive disarming strike
against Russia or China.

The intentional pursuit of nuclear primacy is, moreover, entirely
consistent with the United States' declared policy of expanding its global
dominance. The Bush administration's 2002 National Security Strategy
explicitly states that the United States aims to establish military
primacy: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential
adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or
equaling, the power of the United States." To this end, the United States
is openly seeking primacy in every dimension of modern military technology,
both in its conventional arsenal and in its nuclear forces.

Washington's pursuit of nuclear primacy helps explain its missile-defense
strategy, for example. Critics of missile defense argue that a national
missile shield, such as the prototype the United States has deployed in
Alaska and California, would be easily overwhelmed by a cloud of warheads
and decoys launched by Russia or China. They are right: even a multilayered
system with land-, air-, sea-, and space-based elements, is highly unlikely
to protect the United States from a major nuclear attack. But they are
wrong to conclude that such a missile-defense system is therefore worthless
-- as are the supporters of missile defense who argue that, for similar
reasons, such a system could be of concern only to rogue states and
terrorists and not to other major nuclear powers.

What both of these camps overlook is that the sort of missile defenses that
the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an
offensive context, not a defensive one -- as an adjunct to a U.S.
first-strike capability, not as a standalone shield. If the United States
launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country
would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal -- if any at all. At that
point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defense system might
well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes, because the
devastated enemy would have so few warheads and decoys left.

During the Cold War, Washington relied on its nuclear arsenal not only to
deter nuclear strikes by its enemies but also to deter the Warsaw Pact from
exploiting its conventional military superiority to attack Western Europe.
It was primarily this latter mission that made Washington rule out promises
of "no first use" of nuclear weapons. Now that such a mission is obsolete
and the United States is beginning to regain nuclear primacy, however,
Washington's continued refusal to eschew a first strike and the country's
development of a limited missile-defense capability take on a new, and
possibly more menacing, look. The most logical conclusions to make are that
a nuclear-war-fighting capability remains a key component of the United
States' military doctrine and that nuclear primacy remains a goal of the
United States.

STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB?

During the Cold War, MAD rendered the debate about the wisdom of nuclear
primacy little more than a theoretical exercise. Now that MAD and the
awkward equilibrium it maintained are about to be upset, the argument has
become deadly serious. Hawks will undoubtedly see the advent of U.S.
nuclear primacy as a positive development. For them, MAD was regrettable
because it left the United States vulnerable to nuclear attack. With the
passing of MAD, they argue, Washington will have what strategists refer to
as "escalation dominance" -- the ability to win a war at any level of
violence -- and will thus be better positioned to check the ambitions of
dangerous states such as China, North Korea, and Iran. Doves, on the other
hand, are fearful of a world in which the United States feels free to
threaten -- and perhaps even use -- force in pursuit of its foreign policy
goals. In their view, nuclear weapons can produce peace and stability only
when all nuclear powers are equally vulnerable. Owls worry that nuclear
primacy will cause destabilizing reactions on the part of other governments
regardless of the United States' intentions. They assume that Russia and
China will work furiously to reduce their vulnerability by building more
missiles, submarines, and bombers; putting more warheads on each weapon;
keeping their nuclear forces on higher peacetime levels of alert; and
adopting hair-trigger retaliatory policies. If Russia and China take these
steps, owls argue, the risk of accidental, unauthorized, or even
intentional nuclear war -- especially during moments of crisis -- may climb
to levels not seen for decades.

Ultimately, the wisdom of pursuing nuclear primacy must be evaluated in the
context of the United States' foreign policy goals. The United States is
now seeking to maintain its global preeminence, which the Bush
administration defines as the ability to stave off the emergence of a peer
competitor and prevent weaker countries from being able to challenge the
United States in critical regions such as the Persian Gulf. If Washington
continues to believe such preeminence is necessary for its security, then
the benefits of nuclear primacy might exceed the risks. But if the United
States adopts a more restrained foreign policy -- for example, one premised
on greater skepticism of the wisdom of forcibly exporting democracy,
launching military strikes to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, and aggressively checking rising challengers -- then the
benefits of nuclear primacy will be trumped by the dangers.

[Footnote #1] We develop our argument further in "The End of MAD? The
Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy," International Security 30, no. 4
(Spring 2006).

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