The September/October issue of Foreign Affairs published the exchange of letters on the U.S. Nuclear Primacy article by Keir Lieber and Daryl Press. The exchange includes my letter, which is a very short version of the response that I posted here in March.
The exchange is very interesting and I encourage everyone to read it. I thought that Keir and Daryl handled the letters from Peter Flory (Assistant Secretary of Defense) and Keith Payne very well, arguing quite convincingly that even if the United States does not intentionally give its weapons counterforce capabilities (as Flory insisted it doesn't) or if it has never admitted in public that a preemptive first-strike has been considered a legitimate option (as Payne tried to demonstrate), it does not mean that that capability and that option do not exist. Of course, they do. In fact, in my view one of the weak points of the original article was exactly that it suggested that the drive toward genuine first-strike capability has been a deliberate U.S. policy. It's most certainly not, but this doesn't make it less real or less dangerous. Had Lieber and Press emphasized this point in their original article, it would have been a much stronger piece.
Now to their response to my letter. Well, I think people may disagree about how successful the Bulava missile program is or whether the R-39 Bark program "ended in failure". After all, the very record that I keep here shows that there have been some delays indeed. I just believe that the story is more complex and to say that the delays with Bulava (or problems with other projects) suggest deterioration of the Russian forces is to get only part of the picture and the least interesting one at that.
Then, we are in disagreement about the gap in Russian early-warning radar coverage. Keir and Daryl insist that the gap is there. They even posted a file with pictures of some missile trajectories that are supposed to support their conclusion. But I cannot replicate these results - virtually all the missiles that I "launch" from the same locations get detected by the radars in Pechora or Mishelevka. There might be a very narrow corridor if one would launch a missile from the Arctic coast of Chukotka toward the ICBM base in Irkutsk, but that's about it. I guess we just use different data. For example, I noticed that on their map the Pechora radar is moved to the North from its actual location and its fan is a bit narrower that I believe it actually is - less than 90 degrees vs. 110 degrees (see Table 1).
I would be glad to compare the notes, but I don't think it matters all that much - even if the gap between Pechora and Mishelevka is as wide as Keir and Daryl suggest (which I doubt), there are other radars - for example, a missile launched from the Pacific toward the Dombarovskiy ICBM base would be detected by the radar in Pushkino about 12 minutes before impact. Not very much, but it is as good as it ever going to get for Russia. It's not very different from detecting a launch from a submarine located off the coast of Norway, for example (see Figure 1 in my accidental launch article, for example). And it's always been that way, so the gap in the East, whether it exists or not, does not create any new danger.
Over all, I think it was a very interesting and ultimately useful discussion, which I'm sure is not over yet - International Security will be publishing responses to the full version of the artcile that appeared there.
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Whatever the intention of U.S. strategic nuclear policy, the objective fact is that most of the Russian and Chinese strategic infrastructures, the likely opponents in any nuclear exchange, are vulnerable to American counterforce capabilities, whether they are acknowledged or not.
What happens when nuclear forces are no longer controlled by a national interest?
Most strategic thinking I have seen is based on national entities, their interests and the assumed rationality applied to those interests. Survival is of course one of the basic interests.
But what happens when a nuclear equipped national entity is invisibly subverted by a foregin power that does not share the national interests?
For example, Walt and Mersheimer pointed out that US foreign policy primarily serves Israeli interests. It also serves trans-national corporations who essentially are hostile to the interests of any nation, at least if it restrict access to markets and raw materials.
As far as I can see the rational arguments against a strike out of the blue starts to crumble with declining national interest, in fact it may make perfect sense to a third power to goad the US to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russia and let Russia retaliate and destroy the US in return if global fall-out can be limited.
To avoid being hypothetical I'm thinking of the supranational power that gen. Leonid Ivashov in a 2004 paper identified as Russias real enemy.
http://www.rusjournal.com/ivashov.html
"I've also spoken many times of the emergence of a new geopolitical subject of supra-national character onto the world arena. This is the world financial elite and transnational corporations, consolidated in the name of world dominion, control over all countries and all coalitions of countries."
Such a power would then of course be the enemy of any national entity. Ivashov continues..
"Without question the leading role is played here by the 358 richest people on Earth"
A remarkably exact figure.
An ananymous German analyst put it this way:
"Who is it that mandates the destruction of sovereign nation states and their replacement by economic zones of
interest? The transnationals that make up a part of the military-industrial-corporate-complex. In order to make this possible, three things have to happen first. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights must be weakened. The dollar has to lose its international trade and reserve standard position. The U.S. military personnel needs to be taken out of the picture as a national defense force and be eventually replaced by mercenary forces with utopian weaponry under the
transnationals’ control."
Where does this leave us strategically?