School of War - Ep 159: Rebeccah Heinrichs on the Morality of Nuclear Weapons

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Rebeccah Heinrichs, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of Duty to Deter: American Nuclear Deterrence and the Just War Doctrine, joins the show to make the moral argument for why the United States should modernize and grow its nuclear arsenal.  ▪️ Times      •      01:15 Introduction      •      01:48 A net good     •      04:50 Tactical nuclear weapons     •     10:25 The argument of disarmament      •      14:03 Cold War strategy     •      19:53 Capability and will     •      26:06 Downside of “no first use”       •      32:03 The nuclear triad      •      37:20 Russia and China      •      40:56 The moral argument Watch today’s episode on YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

It may seem strange that the existence of something as terrifying as nuclear weapons could be moral, but my guest today will make that case. We'll also talk about what China's expanding nuclear arsenal means for American decision-making and about how deterrence actually works. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a staleing.

We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Rebecca Heinrichs,

who is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. She's the director of its Keystone Defense Initiative. She served as a commissioner on the bipartisan strategic posture commission and is most recently the author of Duty to Deter, American Nuclear Deterrence and the Just War Doctrine. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for having me. So I take it that at the center of your argument, both in the book and in a lot of the work that you do, that nuclear weapons, despite their awesome and terrible power, are a net good for America's security. and on some level have actually contributed to fewer deaths since their introduction in war than before 1945. Can you spell this out for us a little bit? Why are nuclear weapons ultimately a good thing for the United States to have?

Sure. Well, that is my central argument, and I would say in particular, just so it's not lost, American nuclear weapons have been a net good. So they do have this awesome destructive power, which makes them different than conventional weapons. So they have a psychological component. So they are first and foremost political in nature. And yet they also have a military component. And that's what makes them credible. So they are weapons that the United States threatens to use, but we are willing to use them. So the credibility of our willingness to use them is what makes their deterrent value effective.

Right. And there's some numbers that you talk about in the work that you've done on this question. So from 1800 to the present day, 37. million people have died globally in wars, but most of those deaths occurred in the two World War I, 21 million in World War I, 21 million in World War II. So meaning that in effect, a substantial minority of the total deaths 1800 to the present happened after 1945 in the introduction of nuclear weapons, which while while that's still millions of people, you would expect with the increase of human population for actually the reverse to be true,

but actually the number of deaths in more have plummeted since the introduction of America's nuclear arsenal. Exactly. So this is a bit of the paradox. So even though they have enormous destructive value, and so when people think about nuclear weapons, often their instinct is these are weapons we should get rid of. But when you look at the historical evidence, nuclear weapons have had a restraining effect on major powers as well. And that's because of the concern, the fear that if any country crosses the nuclear threshold and another country responds, that they could continue back and forth, and on the higher end of escalation is violence at the highest level. So that's where that fear, that fear of escalation does have a restraining effect and has caused no power with nuclear

weapons to employ a nuclear weapon in warfare since the United States is the only power to do so in Hiroshima, Nagasaki. There's one aspect of this that is always hotly debated, or at least has been hotly debated since I've come to Washington, and no doubt was for many years before. which is this question of tactical nuclear weapons and whether or not they are stabilizing or destabilizing as a part of the American arsenal. The argument that they would be destabilizing, right, is that while understandably states

are going to be reluctant to employ a nuclear weapon to flatten the capital and murder all the inhabitants of another country's capital city because, of course, that country is then capable of retaliating and doing the same to us, the introduction of tactical weapons so this argument would go increases the chance that someone might actually use such a thing in a conflict.

Battlefield use of nuclear weapons, which was contemplated a lot at the start of the Cold War, would then, of course, in this argument, raise the chance of escalation and ultimately strategic employment of nuclear weapons. What's your assessment of that line of criticism? First of all, I would say you kind of had to step out and say, well, who's the, which country is the one with these theater range or tactical, low yield, potentially nuclear weapons? And right now, there's an asymmetry because Russia,

Russia is investing heavily in this particular category of weapons where the United States since the 90s has decreased the number of theater range nuclear weapons. And so now you have NATO's DCA, so dual capable aircraft that is in theater. And we do have some forward deployed nuclear weapons in theater, but very few. In fact, Russian theater range nuclear weapons outnumber what the United States has deployed 10 to 1 is what public assessments say. So I think it's important for people to understand that just the reality is it is Russia that is threatening to use this particular kind of nuclear weapons. And so the challenge then is is to convince the Russians that they will not succeed in employing and crossing a nuclear threshold with these particular weapons. And to do that, the United States, I've argued, almost certainly needs to reintroduce or change or adapt what we have in theater to credibly threaten the Russians so that they know. that they're not going to out-escalate the United States and compel the United States to stand down

or abandon our interests. So it isn't just the kind of the category of weapons themselves. It really relies on convincing the adversary that if he thinks he's going to use this particular weapon, the United States does have a credible response and could potentially use them. But this idea that just by having them, you are inclined to use them has not borne out to be true. So the argument would run something like in some future scenario in an escalation of the Ukraine war, Vladimir Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon to wipe out some kind of NATO formation on the battlefield. Or, you know, you can use a Pacific scenario. The Chinese use a tactical nuclear weapon to wipe out an American carrier group, which sort of a perfect use of that weapon system and the sense of what it's designed for. It's then credible that the United States might in return do something similar back, wipe out a Russian battle formation.

or a Chinese naval formation. That's credible. We might actually do that under those circumstances, depending on who the president is and, you know, what the military logic of the moment is. And so because it's credible, then it becomes a deterrent. If you do that to us, we may actually do this to you and you believe it, as opposed to the situation that exists if you don't have the capacity to do that or to do it at scale, which is then you're left with the choice of a conventional response, which may be massively escalate or a strategic nuclear response, which I take it to the The critics actually suggest that that's where you might go, that you would then employ a strategic nuclear weapon and that's your deterrent, which is insane, that we would lose it aircraft carrier group in the Pacific and respond by leveling Beijing, thus sparking a global thermonuclear exchange just doesn't seem credible to me. Right. And so the important thing to remember is deterrence relies on convincing the adversary what you might realistically do. And so if the idea is the United States should not reinvest in nuclear weapons at the lower end of the escalation ladder, because if we do, that might make us more inclined to use them.

If that's the logic, then the alternative is that the United States remains at an enormous disadvantage and that the Russians or the PRC has an advantage because they have massive numbers of these kinds of nuclear weapons. And it's simply not credible to your point to threaten retaliation on the high. highest end of violence because you have to, first of all, I mean, are you going to convince the adversary that an American president is willing to do that? Almost certainly not because we almost certainly wouldn't do that. It'd be massive numbers of casualties and could make things, in fact, far worse and might guarantee a like response back against the United States homeland. And so what I've argued is now that we are 40 years since the Cold War and where we have if it was really Bush 41, that withdrew a significant number of these theater-range nuclear weapons,

we are now to the point where if you look at a rising China, heavily invested in its nuclear weapons and expanding its program, and the Russians who have refused to negotiate their theater nuclear weapons, they only negotiate the strategic nuclear weapon. That's what the New START treaty binds, but they don't with their theater nuclear weapons, that now we're at a point where there's an asymmetry there that's high. highly destabilizing. And so the best thing that the United States can do to increase the credibility of our deterrent is to make some changes in this particular area of weapons. So you believe that nuclear weapons contribute to rather than detract from deterrence. We've been talking about that for the last few minutes. We'll talk about it more.

There are critics who suggest essentially that the opposite is true, that the existence of American nuclear weapons specifically is destabilizing bad for global security, bad for American insecurity. There's a new book out by Andy Jacobson on nuclear war that treats this subject covers a sort of bolt from the blue attack by North Korea on the United States, which then leads to an escalation into a sort of, you know, America killing, world killing war. Armageddon. And the general argument from this side of things is actually it's disarmament is what is needed. And America should be brave. I mean, I'm smoohing and combining the arguments of different people here in probably a crude way, but that America should be brave and leave.

on disarmament, that we should step forward, be willing to reduce our arsenal and encourage others to follow. First of all, do you think that's a fair characterization of the other side? And second of all, what is the argument for disarmament? Why do they feel that fewer American nuclear weapons is better for America? Well, right. Well, my first response to that, though, is this book, I think helpfully reminds people that nuclear weapons are awesome, are awesome weapons. And they do have significant physical effects in a way that conventional weapons don't. So if we want to get to a deeply buried hardened target in the middle of China, you're going, you almost certainly in some cases need a nuclear weapon because of its explosive power in a way that conventional weapons can do.

So that is an important, I think, distinction to make. In this particular book, though, it is, it's a really incredibly unrealistic scenario because you've seen since 70 years since, you know, since World War II, we haven't seen something like this happen. That's not an accident or something else going on in human psychology. And again, that gets back to the restraining effect that nuclear weapons seem to have. There's a between between major powers that that have nuclear weapons. But my argument is essentially that the United States, really since the Cold War, has not invested heavily in its nuclear weapons because we, we did want it. It's actually been part of American policy to lead other countries down this path to zero nuclear weapons. And so we've

tried to kind of set nuclear weapons, minimize them a bit in our national defense strategies and have arms control treaty with the Russians. But our adversaries have not chosen to follow. So for this idea that the United States should sort of do something different here and try to have strategic stability through arms control and negotiations and transparency and disarmament, we've actually been trying something like that while maintaining a credible deterrent. Even President Obama, who famously got the Peace Prize for his. aspirations to lead the world down to nuclear zero. He hadn't even done anything yet, but he wanted to do that and his famous sort of his Prague speech. But even, but he with Ash Carter as his secretary defense got in there and looked at

his intel and said, this is not worth the risk. And until we have a worldwide scenario in which that makes sense until our adversaries disarmed, the United States can't, that they are stabilizing in an effect for peace and stability. So I think the historical record shows that we've tried, but our adversaries are always seeking for advantage over the United States. And so you can see that the Russians have gone a completely different direction. They're not abide by the new start treaty obligations. They were cheating on the INF Treaty, famously negotiated by President Reagan. And of course, the PRC refuses to be part of any kind of arms control treaty or nuclear reductions.

And so we're left with the real world in which the United States, in order to create a stable environment and deterrenties. major power conflict, we have to deter our adversaries. So I want to talk about how deterrence worked in the Cold War, but also how the existence of China's arsenal now complicates this. So the fact that we haven't fought World War III or we did not fight World War III with the Soviet Union seems to be powerful evidence that nuclear weapons had to deterrent effect. Talk about how it actually worked in the Cold War. And then the second part of my question, which we can get right to, is we have now not one but two, I mean, three, if you count North Korea as more limited arsenal, potentially four,

looming in the future if you count Iran and the potential of their nuclear program. But in particular Russia and China and China embarked on this, you know, crash expansion, modernization, really more expansion than modernization because so much of this stuff is brand new in the first place. How did it work in the Cold War? How does this new tripartite, triple triangular logic affect it now? Sure. Well, I'll start with during the Cold War. So after when, after Truman, you know, used the bombs to end World War II. There really was this time in which the United States had to think about, well, now would we do with these things, you know? And again, I'm being, you know, oversimplifying and being kind of crude about it. But we, we as a country strategist, military strategists and policymakers had to then think about how are we going to use these nuclear weapons now. We actually don't want to make sure that they are weapons that are used commonly in warfare. They seem to be different. And of course, they were. They're sort of. political weapons with military utility in order to make them credible as political weapons. And so in the Cold War, we really had to kind of grapple with this.

Finally, you had the Soviet Union that was in this massive arms buildup. And so we had another imperialist, an imperialist power that was surpassing the United States numerically in nuclear weapons. And so we had to think about what do we do with this. And Schlesinger, during the Nixon administration, argued very persuasively in congressional hearings that in order for the United States to successfully increase our chance to deter the Soviet Union, that we should build a nuclear force and adapt the nuclear force and deploy a nuclear force such that we are convincing the Soviets that the

United States could put a weapon on targets that the Soviets valued. So we couldn't just think about deterrent sort of in the abstract, you know, how would we behave in these? scenarios, you had to really kind of think about what are the Soviets and then how do we credibly convince the Soviets that the United States might, in fact, use nuclear weapons in defense of our interests. And so this was the counterforce doctrine that we would not target Soviet cities in our deterrent strategy, but we would target with the adversary valued. And that's their military, you know, the conventional strategic systems, what their regime needed to stay in power and what the regime needed in order to maintain control over.

over their population and then their war-supporting industry to reconstitute and build more nuclear weapons. And that kind, Schlesinger argued, of American nuclear posture would be our best bet for convincing the Soviets not to use a nuclear weapon, that if the United States disarmed or shrank our force or only had a handful of weapons, that that would not be credible against the Soviets. And that really, it won the day and that argument. And so we've maintained a nuclear force that has a counterforce strategy, targeting strategy, since then. So then you had Democrat administrations, Republican administrations, and it's maintained its bipartisan, really nonpartisan logic behind it. And then we've added some missile defenses and other things

in order, again, adapting it as the threat environment changed. To your question about how this is different now with China, we've only ever, we, the United States, have only ever, had to deter one major nuclear power, the Soviet Union. And this is really unprecedented in history that now the United States has to size our force, constitute our force, such that we are credibly deterring not just one major nuclear power, but two in the People's Republic of China. And the North Korea problem is a little bit different because we wouldn't need the same kind of size and force to deter North Korea because it has far fewer weapons. And we have a different policy, official policy, where if the North Koreans were to use a nuclear weapon against the

United States, we would end the regime. That's the official policy. We're not going to kind of go back and forth with the North Koreans. That's the end of the North Korean regime. And that's the official U.S. policy. So it's different with North Korea than it is with a major power like the Russian Federation and then it would be with Chinese Communist Party. Right. I think we discussed this the last time you were on the show. I've definitely discussed this on the show with Eric Adelman on this question of counterforce strategy and its origins. But I'm sort of obsessed, partly as a consequence of Aedleman talking him up with William Borden, author of There Will Be No Time, this sort of foundational text of nuclear strategy that's largely ignored today. But, of course, to the extent people know who William Borden is, they know him as the villain, the villain.

I'm using air quotes for anyone listening here on audio of Oppenheimer. He's the guy who turns over the derogatory information about Oppenheimer to the FBI. But he did do that in reality, but also in reality he was an early strategist who's flying back over the North Sea from a bombing raid. during World War II as a V2 flashes by his plane at night. And he has this epiphany, which he then writes this whole book about it. If you put nukes on the V2s, everything will change. Everything will change about the nature of war. And he develops without using the word or the phrase counterforce,

he develops the basic logic of counterforce targeting. He makes the case, this is 46 that this book comes out. He's writing it in the fall of 45, that it's simply insane that we would do anything other than target the other guy's military assets, specifically his nuclear. assets in the event of an exchange, because in the moment, that's the only thing that's going to make sense. You are going to try to reduce his ability to harm you with his nuclear weapons. That's going to be the purpose of the weapon system.

And to the extent that you're successful, you may actually then hope to achieve some strategic goals after that. Now, this is before second strike capability. Borden's not really thinking about deterrence so much as he's thinking about actually fighting a war. But the logic then perfectly comes over to the logic of deterrence, what helps you fight the war helps you deter the war. And the notion, it's also always seems so ironic to me that it's the other side

of this argument, the sort of the pro-disarmament side of it, that argues for the countervalue strategy, which is a strategy of mass murder, explicit mass murder, which it seems to me they don't actually believe we will ever follow through on. Right. Well, it would basically have the practical effect of only restraining the United States, because again, you actually, this is what deterrence rests on really a profound paradox, that Their primary, the primary purpose of American nuclear weapons is to make sure that nobody uses nuclear weapons. But in order for that to work, you actually do have to figure out how to successfully employ nuclear weapons if deterrence fails in order to convince the adversary to stand down that he cannot escalate his way out of this and that the United States has the capability and the will to keep going in defense of its people and its interests.

And so you have to think about what happens if deterrence does fail. If deterrence does fail, what are my options? And you don't want to leave an American president only with the option to do something that he or she is completely unlikely to do, except in the event of, you know, that no kidding, we have to defend the survival of our country. But even then, it has to be something that's going to convince the adversary to stop. And sort of, you know, I remind people, you know, what kind of credible strategy is it to, to threaten to kill, you know, North Korean peasants. Americans care more about North Korean peasants than Kim Jong-un cares about North Korean peasants.

And so it's not credible. So it's not credible from a strategy standpoint, but it's also not credible in part because of the moral implications. And then you get back to this question of, well, you know, countries still have a system of government and an ideology, things that they value that are going to be different. And North Korea is different than China, different than Russia, and, of course, different than the United States. And we place an enormous value on the dignity of the human person, even in our adversaries' countries. And so it makes it just an incredible threat that we would just have these enormous weapons with enormous destructive capability and that we would point them at cities with the sole purpose of killing civilians. And an advantage to the other side is that you only need a handful of nuclear weapons to terms of that threat. So for them, even though they know, they know that this is not realistic as an option for the president of the United States.

And thus, I think they know would reduce its deterrent value. They still, if we were to pursue this strategy in terms of shaping and sizing our arsenal, they would get the very concrete benefit of shrinking it. Because you only need, I don't know what the number is. You don't need that many nuclear weapons to flatten the other guys cities. No, it will depends on, depends on how you target, depends on the explosive capability, depends on the. on the weapon systems, but, but right. I mean, they, they would be to their advantage to convince us that this was a better way to go for us. And then, and of course, they, they wouldn't pursue the same, the same path. But, you know, the other thing about it, though, that is, that's always interesting

to me, the folks who want us to good under fewer numbers of nuclear weapons, the other thing that they will often try to argue for is that the United States adopt a no first use policy. And a no first use policy would be the, would be the explicit U.S. policy. that we would only use a nuclear weapon in the second, that, you know, that we would never use one first. The reason that we haven't done that, and even again, President Obama said that he would do that when he was campaigning for president, that he would adopt a no-first-use policy, and then he eskewed that he didn't do it when he became president after, you know, having a sit-down conversation with his strategist and going through all that, it decided not to do it. And the same thing with President Biden. President Biden, only two Democrat candidates for the presidency said that they would adopt no first-use policy when they're running for office. It was Biden and it was Elizabeth Warren.

President Biden becomes president, and he doesn't do it either. He maintains this strategic ambiguity. The reason that's so important is, to my mind, it's not because we would be able to convince any other power that we would actually have a no-first-use policy. It would be because we convinced ourselves of that, which would be a major problem because we would size the force then to only have a no-first-use policy. But the other problem with it is you are sort of signaling that the adversary can do anything short of employ a nuclear weapon, and then they're not going to be on the receiving end of

an American nuclear weapon. You don't want to send that message because you can still have massive strategic effects with conventional weapons. We've already talked about that in World War I and World War II, huge massive human death and suffering pre the employment of nuclear weapons. And so you don't want to signal that anything short of nuclear weapons isn't going to be on the receiving end of a nuclear weapon. And then, of course, you also have weapons that are inherently kind of terror weapons, which are chemical and biological weapons. And you don't want to unintentionally incentivize the use of those if the adversary thinks that the United States is not going to be willing to use a nuclear weapon unless a nuclear weapon was employed first.

Yeah, I'm not sure the extent to which people who don't follow these issues professionally realize how the imposition of a no-first use policy on the part of the United States would be profoundly destabilizing, profoundly destabilizing to the world. Really upend American grand strategy in the alliance system that we have followed more or less consistently since 1945. You know, if you talk to the Japanese, just to pick an example, you know, they're prepared to defend Japan. They're prepared to defend their interests against the People's Republic of China. But they look to us for strategic deterrence. They look to us for extended deterrence, which is to say it is theoretically possible if this is not a particularly credible scenario sitting here in October of

of 2024, but you never know. The Chinese were to attempt an assault on Japanese sovereignty, on the Japanese home islands. The United States might go nuclear. That is possible. It is within the realm of options. That's the implication of extended deterrence. It allows us to forward position fewer conventional forces abroad, that's an interesting and sort of complicated issue of how you balance those things. And obviously, it's gone through numerous iterations over the course of Cold War and post-Cold War policy. position of no first use would suddenly leave all these allies essentially on their own in the face of conventional threats absent extraordinary at-scale deployments of American conventional

forces with them in their theaters. That's right. So for those who would, you know, argue for the United States who adopted no first use policy, almost certainly one of the first things that would happen if the United States were to do that is you would see proliferation of nuclear weapons because our allies would be very uncomfortable with the assurances the United States extends to them for, for nuclear assurance, and they would get their own nuclear capabilities. Because they want to be confident, they, our allies want to be confident, that if they are targeted with a nuclear weapon from our shared adversary, that the United States would then have their back and seek to force the aggressor

back out of the conflict. And in order to credibly do that in the minds of our allies now, so if deterrence, if the credibility of deterrence really rests exists sort of in the mind of our adversaries, credible nuclear assurance exists in the mind of our allies. And so they are the ones that have to tell us what they need to be assured so that they don't get their own nuclear capabilities. And one of those things has been repeatedly, do not adopt a no first use policy. That would almost certainly increase the chances that we would be on the receiving end of a nuclear weapon and would not be able to count on the United States to get involved in that conflict. because, you know, and I mean, it makes perfectly good logic in the case of our Japanese allies,

they would say, if you're not willing to have strategic ambiguity and you're willing to adopt a no first use policy, are you really not going to be, you know, are you going to risk nuclear escalation to risk your own territory to the defense of ours if you're willing to even adopt a no first use policy? So we want to make sure that they are convinced that, no, we would come to their defense. And that is the best way to maximize our chances to deter the initial act of aggression to begin with. So much of this comes back to the old maxim, originally, I think Roman axiom, if you want peace, prepare for war, which is counterintuitive. It's slightly paradoxical. And the fundamental argument of the disarmament crowd is if you want peace, you should pursue peace. You should turn your swords into plowshares.

And in good faith, extend your hand to the other nations of the world in hope and faith that they will follow and do the same. And the reality is that is the more dangerous. Your core argument is that is the less moral path. Well, it's the less moral path because it increases the chance of deterrence failure. And then the United States would only have weapons to target cities maximize human suffering and human death in the event that deterrence fails if we have a smaller size force on the path to disarmament. But I also think it's really interesting because I, you know, one of the best things to do when you're really having these these thoughts arguments with people, you're trying to. to understand sort of what is their vision? What is their goal? Like, lead me through this, to really kind of put yourself in their position to follow their logic. And really the logic

of these disarmament people, if you want peace prepare for peace, they want to replace nuclear deterrence with global government. That if you can, if everybody can disarm, so here we are, 70 years post, you know, we're into the atomic age. Now we want to move down to global zero. We've already discussed how we know what that world is like. It was the world before World War II, the Rochima Nagasaki, and you still had massive death in human suffering. More. More. More. But let's say they want to go down there. So what does this practically look like? So they don't trust to the point of your, you know, Annie Jacobson's book about how the North Koreans launch a nuclear weapon, the United States launches a nuclear weapon and sort of everyone's acting irrationally launching nuclear weapons.

The Russians are, we can't communicate to the Russians that were launching a nuclear weapon. It overflies their territory. They launched nuclear weapons. So you have a scenario in which these human beings who are making decisions for their own countries are acting incredibly irrationally, and that results in nuclear Armageddon. So they want to replace that with what? With global governments. So you're like, now what does this look like? You're now going to have a benevolent global government that represents everybody's interests to the point where they're sufficiently satisfied so that they're comfortable with disarmament. You know, it's not believable.

It's completely unbelievable that human. human beings can be not trusted with nuclear weapons responsibly, but they can be trusted with benevolent, perfect global government. You know, just look at the UN that's not working out so well, even with the UN. But the other practical thing that I kind of look at and say, well, how does this going to work is all you're going to do is if you get to the point where people do kind of set aside their nuclear weapons, they disarm, you never get rid of the technology. We know how to do this. So you have a bunch of countries with latent nuclear programs. You know, they sit and then you're, I mean, you just, all you have to do, just as soon as the, as soon as one country decides to break out, then that is the country that has the upper hand and is really able to subjugate all the other countries.

And so it's not a realistic end state. And it doesn't, it sort of defies logic and the evidence we have for how human beings and regimes even behave. I agree. It's a, it's a desire to live in a kind of fantasy land as opposed to the real world that we're actually in. So sticking with the real world for a minute then, you've looked into this matter in some sense. detail. And obviously, the School of War podcast, alas, is not classified. So we will stay in the unclassified realm for this next question. But you've looked carefully at the question of China's crash effort to expand their nuclear capabilities. You'll be able to tell us the exact numbers on the Chinese side. But it's suffice to say every year or so, we're revising our estimate upwards of where they're going to end up in 2030 and in the years to come. What does this mean for the United States,

both in terms of our ongoing modernization efforts for the nuclear triad, maybe say a bit about what the nuclear triad is. But what do we need to change and do more of in light of the addition now of a Chinese option on top of the already existing significant Russian threat? Like practically, what does this mean for our investments for Congress, for what we're buying, for what we're developing? Sure. So our current nuclear modernization effort program really started in 2008, 2009. This was part of a grand deal with Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and the Obama administration that was pursuing further cuts to our nuclear, our deployed nuclear weapons with the New START treaty with the Russian Federation. And so the grand deal was if we, the Senate, and it was really John Kyle, retired Senator John Kyle from Arizona, Republican from Arizona, great statesmen. I think we owe an enormous amount of gratitude to him for keeping the United States from agreeing to. to deadly, I think, arms control treaties, disarmament treaties, and then also making sure that

the United States is being wise and prudent in modernizing our force if we are to pursue some kind of reasonable cuts like the New START treaty allowed. But the grand deal was the Obama administration had to commit to modernizing our current triads. It's a triad of delivery vehicles. It's our ICBMs. It's our bombers and it's our submarines. And that each of those delivery platforms has unique characteristics that give them each a different kind of capability to deploy nuclear weapons, and that creates the most credible form of way of to posture our nuclear forces. But in 2009, we were only looking at Russia. We were only looking at how do we deter Russia.

And so our force was sized and postured to deploy Russia, but not only were we only seeking to deter Russia, but we didn't even think that Russia was the acute threat that it is today. You remember, you know, this was the famous President Obama, I disagreeing with candidate Mitt Romney that, you know, like the Cold War, whatever the 1980s called they'd like their foreign policy back. They'd like their foreign policy back. That's right.

Deathless wisdom. That because, because Romney believed that that Russia still posed the greatest capability to the most harmed the United States. And he was right. If you look at just their sheer, in order to evaluate that, which country can pose the greatest threat to the United States? The country has the greatest intent and capability. Today, it's going to be, it's China.

It's the Chinese Communist Party. But the Russian Federation, even though it's a poor country, We look at their economy, so their massive nuclear force is enough that we have to take it deadly, deadly seriously. And so now here we are, our forces size, we're modernizing. Yes, that's great. But it's only, it's being modernized at a pace where the assessment was that Russia didn't pose, didn't pose an acute threat. Now, here we are. Russia is now invaded Ukraine twice. recently 2014 and then 22, a full-scale attempt to subjugate Ukraine and threatening nuclear weapons.

I mean, this has been a huge characteristic of Russia's effort to subjugate Ukraine and to deter the United States and NATO from supporting Ukraine more to the extent we would like to support them more because Russia is now threatening, credibly threatening, I would say. Not a bluff. I mean, credibly threatening to employ a nuclear weapon. And it is more credible because the United States has not adapted our force and provided more nuclear weapons that can get through Russian air defenses in a credible way since they've been, they, the Russians have been advancing their air defenses since the Cold War. And then, of course, we have the China problem now. And so I will stay away from numbers in a podcast. But if you just look at what the Chinese are investing

in now and the speed at which they're investing in, we do, we public intelligence assessments believe that that China will match the United States. It's headed to becoming a nuclear peer within the next, I will just say, several years. So we're not talking about 20 years from now. We're talking about the 2027 timeframe in which Xi Jinping has declared that China will have, you know, a world-class military. And of course, part of that and central to that, I would argue, is their nuclear force. And so our nuclear posture is simply, it was not conceived of at a time where we had to credibly deter both

The Russia in the way Putin has decided to behave aggressively to grab territories and peoples that we do not recognize are his to grab. And then also that Xi Jinping, the rise of Xi Jinping, and then how he is using his nuclear force potentially to coerce and compel the United States to stay out of conflict. So he can grab territory that does not belong to China. Yeah. And just to make clear what the nature of the threat is, it's also we have to contemplate the possibility of joint Chinese, Russian nuclear action, which is insane in a way to reflect on, but really the nub and because to contemplate what this means, you have to think about counterforce strategy. You're talking about nuclear war and using nuclear weapons to strike, other nuclear weapons to strike military assets, at which point it actually does matter if you have, just to make

random numbers up, 2,000 versus 1,000 warheads. It actually does matter in that context because you're not talking about city killing. you were talking about exchanges with strategic purposes. And you can do a lot more with more weapons and then you can do with fewer weapons. And so this as a deterrence question then puts the ball in the American court. It's like, well, can you deter this, you know, the two arsenals simultaneously? No, that's exactly. So again, we want to be able to have the capability to convince Xi Jinping and Putin that we have the ability to respond in a credible way.

to anything that they might throw at us, that we would be able to put weapons on targets to, that would make sense, that we would, to your earlier point, we would want to diminish their capability to respond in a credible way also. So we're going to want to hit what those respective regimes value. And those are, they're growing target list. I mean, if Xi Jinping is going to expand the number of nuclear weapons that he has, and they're going to have characteristics that are unique and hard for the United States

to reach out incredibly convince him that we can destroy that. If you're going to put nuclear and conventional, you're going to mix them and you're going to make them mobile. So you're going to make it, you're going to pop something out and be able to move it quickly. We need to be able to convince him that he's not going to get away with that. That's not going to just sort of, you know, have sanctuary deep inside China. Well, then that necessarily means that the United States has to look at our first day.

What do we have that incredibly convinced Xi Jinping that he's not going to have sanctuary deep inside China with these nuclear capabilities or that are mixed, these mixed fleets of nuclear and conventional, which is also a new thing. I mean, in the past, China has said that they have a no first use policy. And, well, then, you know, they're very curious if they're going to continue to say that when they're clearly building a force that makes it puts the pressure on us to have to assume the worst because they're not being transparent, they're not telling us what their nuclear weapons are for, and they're mixing them, conventional and nuclear. And so, so yes, so the United States has to, it would just stand to reason.

As the Chinese grow the number of things that they're going to use to threaten us with, we're going to have to grow our force to be able to credibly. And I would say not just, it's not even just about numbers. You don't have to go one for one because we can, depends on kind of where they're placed, we might be able to credibly threaten with one to destroy more than one thing or there's various ways to do targeting and I'm not a target here. But the point remains, we do not. want to switch out. We as strategists don't want to just begin saying, look, okay, maybe we can

just, we can threaten with a conventional weapon, meaning a non-nuclear. Because of the political, the psychological effects nuclear weapons have as well, we still want to maintain the ability to put a nuclear weapon on particular key military and regime central targets so that they understand that it's not going to be worth it to them if they try to go down this path. And since we have two powers, to your point, that are increasingly collaborating. That makes it all the harder on the United States. And it also increases what they could potentially do to threaten the United States and our allies. Seems expensive, but seems important you assert, and this is going to my last question to you, that it's also just to think in these terms. It's moral, that there's a moral

case for nuclear weapons, which, you know, to a lot of listeners who may be sympathetic to what we've said so far today may still seem like a perverse thing to say. I mean, these are two. terrible, terrible weapons. They've only been used twice, both cases by the United States, vast civilian suffering in Japan as a consequence of those weapons usage. I mean, there's a longer argument about that and about the end of the war. People should listen to my interview with Richard Frank, about 1945 if they want to get into that set of questions. But how can it be that these weapons, which even in a counter-force world where we are targeting military targets, there will be at best, vast collateral damage, vast collateral damage to civilians. How can it be, you? How can we,

it possibly be moral? Well, we've, back when Schlesinger was making this, the counterforce argument, the Senate, you know, this is what some of the, the questions back were, you know, still, but you're, you're still talking about massive civilian loss of life. And there's multiple responses to that. One, in a massive conventional war, you're still going to have massive conventional, massive loss of life as well. And so the goal of American policymakers is to have minimal civilian and casualties and maximum compelling effect on the adversary to stop, to the aggressor to stop.

And if you simply back down because you don't have the capability, you might have to back down at the great cost of subjugation of it more American loss of life or ally loss of life. And so the adversary has an aim that he is seeking to achieve that is at the great loss of American security, freedom, and prosperity. And so deterrence really comes down to who values their own set of, you know, as the defender, as the United States as the defender, who values their own purported interests more and what are they willing to do to defend them. And if the United States really is going to remain the preeminent global power in which we've had untold American, not just American prosperity, but ally prosperity since the Second World War through the Cold War, because of the nature. of the U.S.-led international system, then we have to be willing to do and to threaten to do credible things in the mind of the adversary so that he doesn't set down this path. And so,

yeah, you're going to have a loss of civilian life, unfortunately, if we do get into a nuclear exchange. But it's not all the same. It's not sort of like, you know, regardless of who uses nuclear weapons first, it's going to be Armageddon regardless. We can affect how many civilians are actually killed by the way. Our nuclear weapons are employed. And so it matters what kind of force you have. It matters how many nuclear weapons you have to convince the adversary not to go down this path.

And so it's not back in the 60s and in the 70s and then again in the early 2000s, there have been studies by outside organizations to look to see how many civilians will die in this particular scenario versus this particular scenario. And you can minimize civilians. casualties by a counter-force attack. And you can maximize civilian casualties by a counter-value attack, a counter-city attack. And so it's in, I've argued in my book, Duty to deter, that the disarmament crowd is actually arguing for a nuclear posture for the United States that would be inherently not proportional and would require the United States to target people.

So it's not discriminant in that way. And so it would run afoul of the just war doctrine and increase the chances of deterrence failure. And so the way the United States has posture of nuclear force is, in fact, most compliant with the just war doctrine and the laws of arm conflict. We don't make an exception for ourselves. We don't say we're going to fight wars in compliance with the laws of armed conflict, but not our nuclear weapons. We even say in the Obama nuclear targeting strategy that was unclassified said that we put our own nuclear force under the restrictions of the laws of armed conflict. We do that ourselves. And we believe that we do that because it makes our force more credible and more moral.

And that's how to preserve the peace of giving ourselves the best shot to be able to do that to deter our adversaries. Rebecca Heinrich's author of Duty to Deterer American Nuclear Deterrence and the Just War Doctrine. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for making the time. Good to be here. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.