By Ryan Swan
Special to the Herald

The 2014 Ukraine crisis, the 2016 election meddling and the ongoing developments in Syria are all surface representations of a waxing tension with Russia, revitalized from its brief post-1991 latency.  The recent imagery of Russian rockets allegedly impervious to anti-missile defense systems raining down on Florida, however, brings to light a particularly troubling side of an impending new Cold War – the nuclear side.
Developments on the Korean Peninsula over the past year have brought nuclear security concerns back into sharp focus.  The Trump administration has reacted to the worrisome state of affairs by updating the last Nuclear Posture Review of 2010.  For an administration seemingly inclined to escalate wherever possible tensions in its foreign policy dealings, it is unsurprising that the new official nuclear stance is nothing shy of provocative.    It expands the circumstances under which the use of nuclear force might be contemplated, calls for the development of new low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons and proposes a trillion-dollar renovation of the existing nuclear arsenal.  It cites deterrence, the time-honored justification for past extravagant nuclear escapades from the hydrogen bomb to Star Wars, as the impetus.
For all the scholarly literature and game theoretic analyses scrutinizing the minutiae of various aspects and iterations of deterrence theory, the foundational deterrence argument can be boiled down to: nuclear weapons prevent war.  The mainstream position, nicely summarized in David von Drehle’s October 2009 Time magazine article under the catchy title “Want Peace: Give a Nuke the Nobel,” notes the bloodiness of the pre-nuclear era, attributes the non-development of World War III during the Cold War to the stabilizing force of nuclear arsenals and relegates contemplation of nuclear disarmament to the realm of aspirational fantasy.  Though it is difficult to contend that these points are absent any merit, past successes of deterrence from the Cold War’s simple two-player bipolarity cannot as seamlessly be extrapolated to the current international security environment with more players, including transnational ”terrorist” organizations, largely immune to the essential mutually assured destruction principle.  Additionally, the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan showed armed conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries to be perfectly possible.
The purpose of this commentary is not, however, to probe the efficacy of deterrence theory, but rather to question whether or not deterrence really justifies expanding the possible use of nuclear arms, developing new tactical weapons and pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into renovation. Is not the current four thousand-plus active warhead strong triad—capable of incinerating the planet many times over—sufficient to deter our enemies and “protect our allies”?
Instead of escalating tensions with potential opponents by threateningly considering broader uses of nuclear force and bolstering our user-friendly tactical arsenal, why not deescalate them by adopting a no first use policy.  In 2016, President Obama seriously considered the possibility of joining China in making the pledge, but ultimately caved to the position that making our adversaries feel less threatened would undermine United States security.  This reasoning, I believe, lacks a sound basis in classical deterrence theory.  A no first use policy still guarantees those contemplating the use of nuclear arms against the United States or our allies of our nuclear retaliation.  A legitimate argument can be made that threatening wider use incentivizes—not prevents—nuclear arms races and proliferation among enemies woefully outmatched on the conventional capabilities front seeking the only meaningful deterrent to United States aggression (see North Korea).
In these times of growing geopolitical strain, why not mitigate as opposed to exacerbate unrest surrounding the most sensitive issue of them all—nuclear security?

Ryan Swan is a Benicia native and current law student at the University of California, Los Angeles.  In 2011, he started the Benicia Forum on Nuclear Power. 

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