(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in RealClearDefense. Mutual Assured Destruction Doesn’t Deter Escalate to Win)
Mutual assured destruction or MAD is not an American doctrine or military strategy. Those who believe MAD is how America deters nuclear armed adversaries assume that any use of nuclear weapons by the United States will be massive. And that any alternative such as the limited initial use of nuclear force, will quickly escalate to a full scale nuclear conflict with both attacker and retaliatory nation being destroyed. Given such assumptions, it is considered logical to assume U.S. deterrent strategy is fixed on massive retaliation and destroying most of the industry and population of our adversaries as that is the only possible use of such weapons.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, a MAD strategy was indeed considered but jettisoned by the United States some 65 years ago. For example, President Kennedy noted an all or nothing strategy made no sense: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy – or of a collective death-wish for the world.” Kennedy succeeded in adopting a strategy far short of all-out retaliation that came to be known as “flexible response” which in 1974 was fully developed by James Schlesinger and eventually codified in a 1980 PDD or Presidential Defense Directive 59.
Whether the United States has 10,000 or 1500 strategic nuclear weapons, our forces were designed to have a secure retaliatory capability at any level of conflict. The objective was to end any conflict as soon as possible and at the lowest level of destruction. But the U.S. goal was not to burn an adversaries cities to the ground. U.S. deterrent strategy was to hold at risk what our adversary valued—an adversary’s leadership, security forces that keep the leadership in power, key war supporting industries and the key weapons used to propel aggression.
Critics of current U.S. deterrent strategy assume that no nuclear armed adversary of the United States believes in “fighting” a nuclear war, so the U.S. should drop its long held deterrent strategy and go “back to MAD” or something like it. But at the same time, many of these same critics join the abolitionists to support a minimal number of nuclear weapons but only to “deter” but not engage in “warfighting.” If conflict breaks out and these weapons will not be used even in retaliation. This takes our nuclear deterrent off the table and reduced to only a bluff.
What then of the multiple nuclear threats by Russia over Ukraine? Such threats are often dismissed as mere bluff. Many may find this idea comforting. After all, if no nuclear armed nation has plans for the limited use of nuclear weapons, and everyone has adopted MAD, the United States need not be concerned with the nuclear balance.
Thus, the mistaken notion that the U.S. has a MAD strategy plays into the hands of Russia and China. These two nations both seek to be able to escalate or threaten to escalate in a crisis or conflict with a limited use of nuclear weapons. The objective is to get the United States to stand down and not come to the defense of her allies, a restraint to give Russia and China a strategic advantage.
Unfortunately, much of the current commentary on nuclear threats still assumes the U.S. and its adversaries maintain a mutual assured destruction strategy as the best means to avoid any use of nuclear weapons. Annie Jacobson’s recent book “On Nuclear War: A Scenario” describes mutual assured destruction strategy—which she assumes the U.S. maintains—as simply MAD or crazy. She posits that any initial use of nuclear weapons would almost automatically result in the all-out use of such weapons, leading to nuclear winter and killing billions. And as such, she calls for the entirety of American nuclear deterrence to be jettisoned.
What Jacobson ignores is that our adversaries of the West have sought military advantage through enhanced nuclear weapons. The Soviets sought to put nuclear weapons in space; then built a huge first strike missile force; then deployed thousands of medium range SS-20s to intimidate and split NATO; and most recently built a theater strike capability to keep the United States and NATO from coming to the robust defense of its allies.
The U.S. nuclear deterrent was never a one size fits all and automatically “fit for purpose.” For example, the U.S. and NATO faced a huge conventional military threat from the USSR from the beginning of the Cold War on the plains of central Europe. The Warsaw Pact tank armies were not matched by U.S. conventional forces whose cost would have bankrupted the U.S. Treasury. The alternative was an extended nuclear “umbrella” over Europe, primarily aimed at Soviet tank armies. Thus, in the initial Cold War period, the U.S. assumed a nuclear conflict would most probably grow out of an initial conventional war.
As technology improved, however, a new threat emerged: a potential Soviet pre-emptive first strike seeking to eliminate much of the U.S. nuclear extended deterrent, followed up by a subsequent conventional invasion of Europe.
In 1963, the U.S. strategic nuclear deterrent consisted of 6000 nuclear warheads while the Russians had 600 warheads. As President Kennedy remarked, this strength and particularly the newly deployed Minuteman missiles were as he said, “my ace in the hole,” that gave the United States the strategic advantage that peacefully ended the Cuban missile crisis.
However, by the time the next decade ended, the 1972 SALT “arms control” treaty process allowed the USSR to deploy 7800 warheads compared to the U.S. force of 8700 warheads, (revealed by a 1983 DoD Net Assessment.) Most worrisome were 3000 highly accurate SS-18 missile warheads, with the overall Soviet nuclear force projected to grow to over 24,000 warheads by 1993. As Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird told Congress in 1974, “the Soviets are going for a first strike force and there is no doubt about it.” The SS-18 eventually did indeed hold at risk the entirety of the U.S. land-based ICBMs, the only highly accurate U.S. deterrent force, leaving the U.S. without the ability to hold at risk key Soviet assets.
This perceived imbalance was known as the “window of vulnerability” and leave U.S. leaders exactly where President Kennedy had previously worried would be the case. The U.S. solved the strategic equation of the window of vulnerability—the USSR empire was brought down. The U.S. deployed the accurate D-5 submarine launched missile and Peacekeeper land based ICBM to its deterrent, the Soviet SS-20s were banned by treaty, SDI was initiated, and the START arms control process brought Russian warheads down to under 2000, a near 80% reduction.
In April 1999 Russia’s President Yeltsin decreed that Moscow develop highly accurate, small, low yield, battlefield useful nuclear weapons. And as former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Hyten warned decades ago, these nuclear weapons were designed precisely to “escalate to win” a conventional conflict or crisis between Moscow and Washington.
Putin thinks the U.S. will not want to risk escalation and the possible massive use of nuclear weapons. That is why Putin has made exactly these threats over NATO’s intervention in the war against Ukraine. The previous administration stood down and did not provide Ukraine the needed military capability to effectively take the fight to Moscow. In addition, Russia assumes the relative weak U.S. theater nuclear forces cannot deter escalatory threats from Moscow. This point was emphasized by the 2023 Strategic Posture Commission report in laying out the opening of what could be described as a new window of vulnerability.
The U.S. is indeed now developing a greater theater nuclear deterrent to close the technology gap. However, simply improving conventional deterrent would not be sufficient. As the U.S. military has repeatedly emphasized, if adversarial nuclear forces are introduced into a conventional conflict, the assumed U.S. advantage “does not hold.” In short, the U.S. conventional military advantage disappears.
In conclusion, the central tenets of mutual assured destruction no longer apply as MAD itself has long been jettisoned. More importantly, our adversaries believe the actual first use of nuclear weapons must no longer be assumed to be taboo. That is the new threat that must be deterred by the U.S. and its allies. The dilemma is that the U.S. needs time to resolve this theater deterrent shortfall but the aggression calendar of our adversaries may not necessarily wait until completed.
Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.