Introduction:
Dmitry Kiselyov’s statements in March of 2014, delivered as a state-appointed leader in Russian news media, are indicative of the shifting status of U.S.-Russian nuclear relations in the first two decades of the 21st century. For the first 10 years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S.-Russia relations seemed to be improving—reaching a highpoint in positive relations in 2002. Unfortunately, since that time the international relationship between these two superpowers has changed for the worse. In 2016, relations between Russia and the United States continue to sour. Unrest in eastern Ukraine, including the Russian annexation of Crimea in March of 2014, has pitted United States and Russian support on opposing sides of a live military conflict. Elsewhere, the United States has strongly opposed Russia’s foreign military strategy in war-torn Syria. Despite vehement assertions by the United States and other Western powers that Syria’s President Assad must be removed from governance, Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed Syrian President Bashar Assad to the Kremlin on a lavish official state visit. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s February 2016 comment that “we are rapidly rolling into a period of a new Cold War” underscores the decay in U.S.-Russian relations since the 2002 high-water mark.
The worsening of U.S.-Russian relations carries a special significance in international politics. Taking into account the still recent Cold War animosity of the 20th Century, and with Russia and the United States currently possessing an approximate nuclear weapon inventory of 7,300 and 6,970 weapons respectively, both countries should be concerned about the potential for mutually destructive nuclear annihilation.
Like the fluctuating positivity in U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations, the current state of mutually assured destruction (MAD) between these states has vacillated significantly over the past 25 years. Importantly, a significant vacillation in the relative nuclear strength of the U.S. and Russia culminated in a period of time at the turn of the century when the U.S. achieved (or was poised to achieve) nuclear primacy over Russia.
As a whole, this paper will adopt a neo-realism perspective on international relations to analyze the U.S.-Russian nuclear relationship in the early 21st century. With neorealism in mind, this paper will utilize considerations of externalities, information problems, and audience costs to motivate the U.S.’s decision to avoid a policy of continued nuclear primacy over Russia.
Literature review:
In 2006, as diplomatic relations between Russian and the United States began their decline, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press published “The End of MAD: The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy” in International Security. This controversial paper made the claim that, “for the first time in decades, it [the U.S.] could conceivably disarm the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a nuclear first strike.” By strategically matching each leg of the U.S.’s nuclear triad with a Russian target, Lieber and Press concluded that “…the likelihood of a single [Russian] ICBM silo, mobile missile shelter, runway, or submarine surviving [a preemptive] attack falls outside the 95 percent confidence interval.” That is, under peacetime alert levels, the U.S. could launch a nuclear first strike that would completely eliminate the possibility of a Russian retaliatory strike.
Lieber and Press’s work faced some stiff criticism. Perhaps the most notable claim among dissenting research was submitted by Bruce Blair and Chen Yali in a 2006 edition of China Security. In “The Fallacy of Nuclear Primacy,” Blair and Chen argue that Lieber and Press had undervalued the strength of Russian early warning systems—and had thus not fairly considered the strength of a Russian “launch on warning policy.” While Blair and Chen agree with the validity of numerical analysis presented in “The End of MAD?,” they stipulate that Lieber and Press’s conclusions could only be realized when (incorrectly) assuming a catastrophic failure of Russian early warning systems. Blair and Chen also attack what they see as optimistic assumptions in “The End of MAD” relating to U.S. missile accuracy, the U.S.’s ability to discreetly mobilize all legs of the nuclear triad, and the stasis of Russian mobile rocket delivery systems (i.e. strategic missile launchers and submarines). For the purposes of this paper, taking into consideration the strength of the arguments presented in “The End of Mad” and Lieber and Press’s follow up article, “U.S. Nuclear Primacy and the Future of the Chinese Deterrent”—which specifically addressed many of Blair and Chen’s concerns —it will be assumed that Lieber and Press’s initial assumptions and analysis are sound. However, it is important to recognize that many of the concerns raised by Blair, Chen and others are reminders of the information problems that face the U.S. when comparatively evaluating the nuclear arsenals of potentially hostile states.
While Lieber and Press’s claims will be assumed for the purposes of this paper, it is important to note that, as of 2012, MAD has been reestablished in the U.S.-Russia relationship. Via the Center for Strategic and International Studies, David Elkind published a repeat of Lieber and Press’s original methods and analysis—taking into account 2006-2012 developments in Russian and U.S. nuclear infrastructure. Elkind concluded that, while the U.S. might have had nuclear supremacy when Lieber and Press published, Russian improvements to its nuclear arsenal had since reestablished MAD.
After the use of nuclear weapons in Japan in 1945, the culture for dictating acceptable nuclear weapon use has changed significantly. In her article “Stigmatizing the Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo,” Nina Tannenwald argues that the development of international standards against the tactical use of nuclear weaponry makes it rarely (if ever) appropriate to use nuclear technology in a preemptive situation. Tannenwald states:
“It [the nuclear taboo] has developed to the point that uses of nuclear weapons that were once considered plausible by at least some U.S. decisionmakers—for example, tactical battlefield uses in limited wars and direct threats to deter enemies from conventional attack—have been severely delegitimized and are practically unthinkable policy options.”
It was once permissible to think about nuclear weapons as simple military tools, implying that nuclear weapons may be used strategically to achieve military goals; however, as Tannenwald notes, contemporary international culture surrounding nuclear weaponry is very different. This contemporary, anti-strike attitude towards nuclear weapons is referred to as “nuclear taboo” by Tannenwald. Tannenwald explores the impact of a nuclear taboo in her paper “The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Normative Basis of Nuclear Non-use.” Here, she claims that, “an emerging taboo…[through] 1991…helped to restrain use of nuclear weapons. ” Tannenwald’s conviction, that a worldwide taboo limits the use of nuclear arms as strategic weapons or as deternets of conventional military aggression, does not go unchallenged. Lieber and Press, in “U.S. Nuclear Primacy,” articulate that, under certain domestic pressures, a nuclear taboo itself would fail to prevent nuclear strikes. Akin to how Selectorate Theory explain how a state’s leader makes international decisions based on a desire to remain in power by maintaining a winning coalition, Lieber and Press contend that “the United States will violate taboos when Americans feel angry and scared.” Despite Lieber and Press’s concerns that the U.S. would bow to internal pressure and not observe internationally established taboos, Tannenwald presents a viable case that using nuclear weapons outside the realm of nuclear deterrence would have severe negative consequences for the offending power.
U.S. Nuclear Primacy:
To motivate the concern that U.S. nuclear primacy would undermine nuclear deterrence in the U.S.-Russia relationship, let us first consider the benefits of MAD. Solving a turn based game, which models U.S.-Russia MAD, using backwards induction clearly shows the positive nature of MAD as a deterrent. Under MAD, if the U.S. or Russia launches a preemptive nuclear strike, it is clear that they would be ensuring their own nuclear destruction on the next move. MAD functionally creates a system where the launch of any type of preemptive nuclear attack would be akin to destroying one’s own country. As such, MAD effectively ensures that both participating countries could not launch a nuclear strike out of self-interest.
In contrast with the game presented in Appendix A1, a different outcome would evolve if the U.S. had nuclear primacy over Russia. By solving this new game using backwards induction, it would seem as though the U.S. would be able to destroy Russia without concern that it would face its own nuclear destruction. Given that, “nuclear arms remain highly significant in relations and strategic dynamics between the United States and Russia, not simply as symbols but also as instruments of coercive leverage in crisis and deadly weapons in the event of war,” relative primacy of the United States over Russia would allow the United States to extract military and financial concessions from the Russian government.
While the U.S. has long been considered to have conventional force primacy, MAD had been the status quo in U.S.-Russian nuclear relations since the early 1960s. The United States has reason to pursue nuclear primacy over this relatively long-standing status quo. While MAD exists, Russia and other nations have the ability to limit, to some degree, the United States’ power. Before the onset of U.S. nuclear primacy, if U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations were to deteriorate (as it did after 2002), Russia could still pose an existential threat to the U.S.—thus potentially limiting U.S. bargaining power in a crisis situation. A neo-realism perspective of international relations suggests that “states seek to increase their power so long as doing so does not place their security at risk.” Given the seeming increase in U.S. power as a result of nuclear primacy, there is a warrant to believe, from a neo-realist perspective, that the U.S. should have pursued such nuclear primacy in the early 21st century.
As we can derive from Elkind’s conclusions, the U.S. did not actually solidify its position as a nuclear dominant force. Seemingly contrary to the neo-realist warrant established in the previous paragraph, the U.S. actually agreed to a bilateral arms control agreement with Russia in 2002. The remainder of this paper works to explain the U.S.’s decision to not pursue nuclear primacy over Russian without contradicting the neo-realist perspective adopted earlier.
Neo-Realism Caveats:
Neo-realism asserts that, “a bipolar international system is more predictable and hence more secure and more stable than a multipolar system.” As such, a neo-realist would be understandably concerned with a situation leading to the nuclear primacy of any one power. Firmly establishing U.S. nuclear primacy in the 21st century would collapse a bipolar system—which was already weakening after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.—into a unitary one. However, while there are likely many neo-realists employed in positions steering the course of U.S. nuclear investments and objectives, without further investigation into the motives and calculations of the United States, the general preferences of neo-realism for a bipolar system are insufficient to explain why, from the perspective of the United States, nuclear primacy was undesirable. Granted, a unitary international system may be more or less stable for the world as a whole; however, from the perspective of the economic, conventional weapon, and nuclear weapon hegemon, a unitary system may actually lead to greater internal stability.
Approaching the U.S.’s decision to surrender nuclear primacy from a strategic perspective, a few more historical facts need to be considered. First and foremost, an assumption made in Lieber and Path’s work should be kept in mind: in order for the U.S. to successfully destroy Russian nuclear counterforces, the U.S. must launch a surprise attack on Russia under peacetime alert levels. The unlikelihood of the U.S. being able to successfully coordinate such a massive military procedure without alerting Russian intelligence was mentioned in Blair and Chen’s critique of “The End of MAD?.” This critique may help explain, why the U.S. did not launch a preemptive nuclear strike when it did have primacy.
While the U.S. might increase its world power by destroying Russia—a historical foe and major nuclear power—the actions needed to be successful in such a nuclear strike would have compromised the existential safety of the U.S. as a whole. Should Russia successfully uncover U.S. war-plans, which would pose an existential threat to Russia in this case, a neo-realist perspective would suggest that Russia might take extreme measures to ensure its survival. Should Russia discover U.S. war-plans that threaten the Russian state’s existence, the situation would immediately resolve into a game that, via reverse induction, would lead to the non-existence of the United States. Because of this, the U.S. would need to evaluate the likelihood of Russian intelligence discovering its war-plans before the existence ending strike was completed. Given the extreme negative utility of having nuclear war-plans to destroy Russia discovered, considering the expected utility equation, the likelihood, p, of success (i.e. the Russians not discovering the war-plans) would need to be impossibly high for the U.S. to put into action war-plans to destroy Russia.
While the above explanation sheds some light on the U.S. decision not to mobilize war-plans to destroy Russia while the U.S. had nuclear primacy, this explanation still does not fully elucidate the why the United States allowed its nuclear primacy to lapse by 2012. To explain this phenomenon, we need to consider factors not usually considered highly in neo-realist analysis. As was mentioned in the above Literature Review, Tannenwald has presented work that suggests that a strong “taboo” has developed against the use (or threatened use) of nuclear weapons. While, in her paper, Tannenwald adopts a more liberal perspective on foreign relations than the neo-realism perspective presented here, her arguments still carries some weight in a neo-realist framework. The taboo that she describes accompanying nuclear weapon use would mean that an American nuclear surprise attack on Russia would likely bring with it negative economic and security effects that are a neo-realist should not ignore. Should the U.S. have taken advantage of its nuclear superiority, given the universal taboo against nuclear weapons, the U.S. would likely face detrimental audience costs that need to be considered within its preference ordering. Given that the U.S.’s nuclear primacy was slight at best over Russian in the early 21st century, it is unlikely that the U.S. would be able to exert control over all the world’s nuclear powers. The taboo against nuclear weapons could mean that U.S. military and trade alliances (e.g. with Japan, Britain, France, Israel, China etcetera), which have been strong for the past 70 years, would be in jeopardy. By taking advantage of its nuclear primacy to attack another sovereign state, the U.S. may functionally lose power in world politics due to audience costs—competing with any sort of power gains the U.S. might have head in the lead up to a preemptive nuclear strike.
Concluding Remarks:
As the Russian economy again begins to show vulnerabilities in 2016, the issue of American nuclear primacy is something that will quickly return to public consciousness. Given that, as the Russian economy weakens, strategic nuclear-armed submarine patrols may become less frequent and plans to upgrade the Russian nuclear arsenal are already being shelved, the U.S. may soon again face the decision of whether it should embrace nuclear primacy or again allow primacy to seed towards another nuclear power.