Good morning, everyone.  It’s a pleasure to be back at Bacon House, and to be part of this fascinating discussion of how to rebuild international order after the Ukraine war. 

I’ve been asked to say a few words about the nuclear aspects of this challenge, such as how we might be able to restore some kind of functional arms control regime.  I can’t provide you with anything more than my own personal opinions, of course, but I’ll offer what I can.

Most observers are aware of the ways in which the Putin regime has tried to use nuclear saber-rattling to scare Western countries into providing less support for Ukraine. (1)  And they may be aware of the degree to which Russia has systematically dismantled the post-Cold War arms control enterprise (2) over the last few years, by violating multiple agreements. (3) 

You may be less aware, however, of the connections between these phenomena, and the implications of that connection for the future of arms control.  That’s what I’d like to stress to you here today, though I must confess it’s not a pretty story.

The longstanding pattern of Russia’s institutional dismantlement of arms control complements Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling in service of the Kremlin’s revisionist ambitions.  Russia has used its arms control violations to help create what I call an “offensive nuclear umbrella” – and the Biden Administration describes as a “shield” – behind which Putin can conduct territorial aggression. 

Thanks to its refusal to comply with the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs) of the early 1990s and the nuclear forces it built in violation of the INF Treaty, Russia has a vastly more powerful arsenal of theater-range forces than we do, which it threatens to use in hopes that we and our allies will be deterred from helping Ukraine. 

In its war against Ukraine, moreover, Russia uses forces that were once subject to the requirements of the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty – an instrument that Moscow has ignored since 2007.  Nor does it any longer have to face the prospect of ex-Soviet nuclear weaponry in Ukrainian hands, thanks to the promises Russia made in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity – promises which Putin, of course, now ignores.  And Russia has been building new strategic-range systems that fall outside the central limits of the New START agreement, though Putin recently began violating that too.

This is a Russian challenge that has been years in the making, undertaken by a regime that used arms control, used the West’s commitment and fidelity to arms control institutions, and used our somewhat naïve commitment to the teleology of inevitable nuclear reductions.  It has weaponized those things to help it prepare itself for aggression and conquest.

And all this is not even counting the challenge presented by China, which disdains any arms control with the United States, even while now engaged in a “sprint” toward nuclear parity, or perhaps even superiority.  China, too, seems to like idea of an “offensive nuclear umbrella,” having chosen to reveal its nuclear ambitions in 2021 – with the construction of hundreds of new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos, at a pace the Pentagon estimates will enable it to field some 1,500 warheads by the year 2035 – in time to help unsettle Western planners worried about strategic escalation should China attempt to invade Taiwan, perhaps as soon as 2027, or conceivably even earlier. 

Is there any scope for traditional arms control agreements with Russia and China?  Maybe, but we shouldn’t get our hopes up. (4) 

Today, with China firmly refusing to come to the table and Russia positively delighting in the numerical advantages in some types of nuclear systems it obtained violation of its promises and agreements, additional traditional negotiated arms control limits seem hard to imagine. (5) 

An alternative approach, for which I myself have voiced some support, would be to forego – for now, at least – the pursuit of traditional numerical arms limits in favor of Transparency and Confidence-Building Measures (TCBMs) such risk reduction, transparency, norms of behavior, and crisis communications efforts. (6)  This is basically what the Biden Administration now calls for. (7)

But I also suspect that neither Russia nor China wants such TCBMS.  There problem here is what I’ve been referring to as those regimes’ “offensive nuclear umbrella” strategies.

The TCBM concept tends to assume that the participants in such arrangements actually wish to reduce tensions and increase stability and predictability, and that more transparency and exchanges of information about force postures and strategic thinking will serve this purpose.   

The problem, however, is that if your objective is to spring a nuclear weapons build-up on your strategic competitors and use nuclear saber-rattling to create an “offensive umbrella” under which to invade and conquer your neighbors, sharing information about your real thinking may be the last thing you’d want to do. 

Instead, you’d want to lie and dissemble for as long as you can.  Even if you did happen to share accurate information, moreover, such honesty about your aggressive plans would engender not trust and stability, but rather distrust and instability.  And if you revealed true information about your posture and thinking before you were ready to take advantage of the offensive umbrella those plans were intended to create, you’d run the risk of defeating your strategic purpose by giving your adversaries more time to prepare. 

An offensive nuclear umbrella strategy arguably works better in deterring intervention against regional conventional aggression the more tension and distrust there is.  The point is to convince the adversary that the situation is so volatile, and the risk of catastrophe so high, that the aggressor should be permitted carte blanche to devour its regional victims unmolested. 

Hence the problem with seeking TCBMs with Russia and China: if that’s their game, then effective, tension-reducing, stabilizing transparency and confidence-building steps would be for them a bug, not a feature. (8)

And that may really leave arms controllers in a quandary, for if even non-binding TCBMs are off the table, what is there to do if there is to be any hope for arms control?

Nevertheless, before I depress you too much, I don’t think that means we can’t do anything. 

One element of a strategic response to an “offensive umbrella” strategy entails doing as much as possible to permit the United States, its Allies, and its partners to meet the threat of such regional aggression below the nuclear threshold. (9) 

But with regard to nuclear deterrence itself, we need to acknowledge that one of the key elements of a Putin-style “offensive umbrella” strategy is creating and maintaining an imbalance in theater-range nuclear weaponry.  This imbalance gives the aggressor the implied option of local nuclear escalation in the event we intervene against his aggression: escalation that would still remain under the level of a “strategic” exchange, confronting us with the unappealing dilemma of either letting the attacker have its way with the victim or initiating a general nuclear war.  This would, of course, encourage the aggressor to conclude that we wouldn’t act.  Such a sub-strategic imbalance, therefore, is destabilizing, undermines deterrence, and increases the risk of aggression and conflict.

I would submit that for arms control to be a part of a strategic response to such an adversary strategy, the seeker of the “offensive umbrella” needs to be given some compelling reason to negotiate.  And this necessarily involves a willingness to build countervailing nuclear capabilities. (10)

I can almost hear your collective intake of breath here, with this State Department audience, but remember that the United States once understood this very clearly.

The INF Treaty, after all, had its origins in the Soviet Union’s decision in 1976 to start deploying hundreds of SS-20 ballistic missiles.  This intermediate-range nuclear-armed missile confronted NATO with a new threat, for which there was initially no response. (11) 

The resulting asymmetry was destabilizing, for NATO then possessed only nuclear systems in Europe with shorter ranges, which could not threaten targets in the USSR, including those SS-20s.  The SS-20 deployments thus risked undermining NATO deterrence, threatening to “decouple” the United States, as the strategic jargon had it, from its NATO allies in Europe.

Accordingly, in response, NATO took decision in December 1979 to authorize the U.S. deployment to Western Europe of nuclear-armed ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) and “Pershing II” intermediate-range ballistic missiles.  These deployments were controversial, but duly took place beginning in late 1983.

But NATO did not just deploy these systems in response to the Soviets’ SS-20 provocations.  It also sought to use these deployments in arms control negotiation, since these moves ensured the Soviets now had a reason to be interested in mutual restraint in intermediate-range forces. 

And indeed, preliminary arms control discussions began in 1980 after the NATO decision had been made, and in 1981 President Reagan announced a proposal in which the United States would eliminate all of its so-called “Euromissiles” if the Soviet Union would dismantle its own intermediate-range forces. (12)  This eventually led to the INF Treaty of 1987, which achieved exactly that, becoming the first arms control agreement ever to eliminate an entire class of delivery systems.

It may be that some variant on this conceptual model offers the best hope for arms control today in response to contemporary Russian and Chinese “offensive umbrella” strategies. 

Nor am I either the first or the only expert to make this point.  Indeed, as far back as the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, the United States explicitly suggested the possibility of trading U.S. abandonment of our submarine-launched cruise missile-nuclear (SLCM-N) program for Russian reductions of non-strategic nuclear systems, “just as the prior Western deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe led to the 1987 INF Treaty.” (13)

I think the basic conceptual model of Reagan’s “zero option” – updated in some form, and also presumably expanded to include China, so that neither Washington nor Moscow cedes theater nuclear supremacy to Beijing – remains a viable one. (14) 

This is not to say that we necessarily need simply to replicate Russian or Chinese deployments of such systems, for we surely don’t.  We need to develop more sophisticated nuclear deterrence heuristics than just mirror-imaging, and ones that consider cross-domain dynamics related to sophisticated conventional weaponry, cyberspace, and counterspace capabilities. 

But something more is needed than we are presently doing, and simply sitting on our hands would be foolish.

The “zero option” legacy offers us a genuinely strategic way to think about these challenges.  It provides the possibility of using responsive capacity-building both to meet security threats and to incentivize and catalyze negotiated arms control limits. 

One is even tempted to conclude that something inspired by Reagan’s “zero-zero” approach might even represent arms control’s “last best chance” in this once again fiercely competitive nuclear age.

Thanks.

-- Christopher Ford

Amplifying Notes

(1)       Thus, for example, the head of Russia’s State Duma warns that provision of equipment to Ukraine could produce “global catastrophe,” and former president Dmitri Medvedev has said Western aid “brings the nuclear apocalypse closer.”  Putin himself has said he deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus, and that if anyone is “thinking of inflicting a strategic defeat on us … the use of extreme measures is possible.”  They seldom quite promise nuclear attack, but Medvedev recently came just about as close as anyone has:

“Imagine if the … [Ukrainian] offensive, which is backed by NATO, was a success and they tore off a part of our land then we would be forced to use a nuclear weapon according to the rules of a decree from the president of Russia.  There would simply be no other option.”

Nevertheless, though even the Russians shy away from a direct threat by anyone who actually has the ability to give such orders, they clearly want us to think about it, to worry about it, and to be frightened by the specter of nuclear escalation into letting the Kremlin erase the sovereign democratic country of Ukraine from the map. 

(2)       To understand the implications of Russian policy today, you’ve got to go back a few decades to the beginning of the arms control process between Washington and Moscow.  The United States has a long history of arms control with Moscow, of course, going back all the way to 1963.  That was the year in which the Hotline Agreement established a secure teletype link that could be used directly between the U.S. President and the Soviet premier, and it was the year of the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water, which prohibited aboveground nuclear testing. 

In 1972, this track record of negotiated restraint with Moscow expanded to include not just numerical constraints upon strategic delivery systems (with the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) and upon ballistic missile defense systems (with the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty), but also an agreement to set forth “best practices” and limit forms of conduct deemed liable to create nuclear escalation risks, the Incidents at Sea Agreement.  By the late 1980s, as Cold War  tensions eased, negotiated nuclear arms reductions began, with the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987 and then the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991. 

The early post-Cold War era was also the time in which were negotiated key agreements intended to stabilize that new era and help perpetuate what was perceived as a generally “post-competitive” environment in a Europe that had previously been wracked by conflict and Cold War rivalries for hundreds of years.  In this respect, for instance, the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty of 1990 sought to impose limits on and transparency for deployments of conventional forces the clash of which could lead to nuclear escalation.

Meanwhile, the Open Skies Treaty of 1992 set up a system for permissive technical monitoring via photographic aerial overflights, to help reassure leaders from Washington to Moscow – and everywhere in between – that large-scale invasions were a thing of the past and Europe had truly turned the corner into a more cooperative era.  The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances also helped cement this peaceful European order in place, by enlisting the Russian, American, and British governments to jointly pledge “to respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine” and “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine” in connection with that country giving up the nuclear weapons the Soviet collapse had stranded on Ukrainian soil.

(3)       As Dr. Ford summarized in one of the Arms Control and International Security papers he published when serving in the U.S. State Department, the Russian government has been systematically undermining the post-Cold War arms control and stability architecture for many years.  The Kremlin, for instance, never fully honored the promises it made in the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs) of the early 1990s to eliminate nuclear warheads for short-range delivery systems, and today has an arsenal of such systems vastly larger than the practical handful of nuclear gravity bombs the United States retains in Europe after having complied with its PNIs.  Russia began violating the INF Treaty in 2008, moreover, and had actually produced and deployed multiple battalions of prohibited intermediate-range cruise missiles before the United States withdrew from that treaty, in response to these violations, in 2019.  Despite a supposed moratorium on nuclear testing, Russia has also secretly conducted nuclear weapons tests that have created nuclear yield. 

Today, Russia is now again in the business of building shorter-range nuclear weapons systems not covered by the “New START” agreement – including missiles it began building and deploying in violation of the INF Treaty –  as well as strategic nuclear delivery systems of a sort (e.g., its Avangard air-launched ballistic missile, the nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered “flying Chernobyl” Burevestnik cruise missile, and the Poseidon underwater revenge drone) also not covered by New START.  And indeed Russia has recently begun to violate New START, thus breaking the last remaining strategic arms agreement in the world.

Nor are things better in terms of conventional arms control.  Russia stopped complying with the CFE Treaty in 2007, and apparently never fully complied at any point with its Open Skies obligations.  The world saw how little the solemn promises of the Budapest Memorandum meant to Moscow when the Russians invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014.  (These days, Vladimir Putin regards “the entire Ukrainian statehood” as an illegitimate project of “artificial divisions.”)  Today, with war raging in Ukraine in which Russian forces have apparently engaged in mass kidnappings of Ukrainian children and the systematic massacre of civilians in occupied areas, we also see how little the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) itself means to Russian authorities.

With regard to other weapons of mass destruction, Moscow violated the Chemical Weapons Convention by developing – and even using – its infamous novichok-class of chemical weaponry, and also maintains a biological weapons program in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.  On top of all this, Russian officials have been backing away from their previous agreement with other international stakeholders that the LOAC applies to warfare conducted in cyberspace, and that countries shouldn’t engage in massive cyberattacks against civilian critical infrastructure in peacetime. 

(4)       Indeed, for all of its understandable complaints about prior U.S. arms control diplomacy that desperately sought nuclear reductions trending toward “Zero” pursuant to President Obama’s “Prague Speech” of April 2009, even the Trump Administration tried to pursue arms control with Russia and China in the form of a “trilateral” deal that would have involved a de facto “freeze” on nuclear force expansion in “an unprecedented overall warhead cap.”  And in fact Russia did at one point indicate some qualified acceptance of this concept, though this effort ultimately collapsed because China refused to entertain the idea.

Today, with the Biden Administration having agreed to extend New START with the Russians not long before Moscow started violating that agreement – and with China still refusing to talk – additional traditional negotiated arms control limits seem hard to imagine.  The Biden Administration has said it seeks “bilateral arms control discussions with Russia and China without preconditions,” but neither Moscow nor Beijing yet seems responsive.

(5)       In fact, U.S. strategic planners now face a problem that might be analogized to the famous “three-body problem” of the interaction between three masses in Newtonian mechanics.  As the Biden Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review makes clear, 

“[b]y the 2030s, the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.  This will create new stresses on stability and new challenges for deterrence, assurance, arms control, and risk reduction.”

The 2022 National Defense Strategy makes the same point, noting that we “increasingly face the challenge of deterring two major powers with modern and diverse nuclear capabilities,” which creates “new stresses on strategic stability.”  And since – at least in Newtonian physics – the three-body problem is reputedly “practically ‘unsolvable’… [for] it is essentially impossible to find a formula to exactly predict their orbits,” we may have good reason to worry about the implications of Russian and Chinese policy for the future of nuclear stability.

(6)       The basic concept behind TCBMs, as the United Nations’ Office of Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) puts it, is that these steps can

“prevent conflict by providing States with practical tools to exchange information, build trust[,] and reduce tensions at the bilateral, regional[,] or global level.  Such measures help reduce excessive or destabilizing accumulations of arms and prevent misperceptions, miscalculation[,] and escalation between States.”

(7)       Biden officials call for “non-legally binding risk reduction, transparency, and confidence building measures, military and scientific dialogues and exchanges, norms of behavior, [and] crisis communications efforts.” 

(8)       Fundamentally, these problems aren’t “arms control” problems as much as they are broader geopolitical problems of the biggest powers in the global system having strategic objectives that are in key ways structurally incompatible and antagonistic, and with two of those powers being shockingly risk-tolerant in the lengths they seem willing to go in support of their revisionism.  These problems are indeed about “arms,” including nuclear ones, but only to the extent that arms are among the tools with which these broader games are being played.  Nor is it clear that better managing the “arms” aspects of these challenge would do much to change or ameliorate the underlying difficulties, even while the persistence of those deeper problems would likely make agreement on arms-related measures hard to come by. 

(9)       That means bolstering our alliance and partnership relationships and expanding collective non-nuclear capabilities in ways that can help meet deterrence challenges – and indeed warfighting challenges, should deterrence fail – as effectively as possible.  Expanding the “pre-nuclear window” during which we still retain the option of effective defensive response by non-nuclear means – even against a great power revisionist which is able to concentrate its forces on a single regional objective, whereas U.S. deployments still necessarily have to balance theater conflicts against continuing global responsibilities – will naturally tend to erode the efficacy of “offensive umbrella” gambits by both signaling deterrent credibility and throwing the onus of escalation back on the would-be aggressor. 

Doing that won’t be easy.  It will take a good deal of money, sustained attention and political support, a greater willingness to cooperate with friends on advanced technologies, and success in making our own defense procurement system more agile, innovative, cost-effective, and responsive than it presently is.  Nor, as the Ukraine war demonstrates, can we continue to ignore the “magazine depth” problem of stockpiling and being able to produce advanced munitions in sufficient quantities to be genuinely useful in high-intensity conflict with a “near-peer” adversary.  But all this is hardly impossible, and it is certainly necessary.

(10)     This, for instance, was the logic behind the Trump Administration’s “responsive strategy” developed in 2017 to Russian INF Treaty violations.  Under that approach, the United States still retained some hope that Putin could be persuaded to scrap his illegal cruise missile – a weapon we revealed as having the Russian designator 9M729 – but we recognized that he wouldn’t do so without an incentive that went beyond Obama Administration finger-wagging.

Accordingly, the National Security Council authorized the Department of Defense to begin its own work on an INF-class missile.  This permission carefully stopped short of flight-testing or production, so that we would not ourselves violate the Treaty, but was intended to clearly demonstrate to Moscow that if it did not come back into compliance, it faced the prospect of the United States developing its own intermediate-range delivery systems for the first time since the Cold War. 

At the same time, the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review made clear that the United States would begin work on a nuclear-armed submarine-launched cruise missile (SLCM).  Notably, this was undertaken not only as a necessary response to Russian nuclear deployments, but in the explicit hope that “U.S. pursuit of a SLCM may provide the necessary incentive for Russia to negotiate seriously a reduction of its non-strategic nuclear weapons.”

When even these steps were not sufficient to persuade the Russians to change course, Secretary Pompeo declared in December 2018 that development of the 9M729 placed Russia in “material breach” of the INF Treaty, and that if Russia did not return to compliance within 60 days, the United States would – consistent with Article 60 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties – suspend its own INF obligations.  After Russia didn’t return to compliance, the United States duly suspended those obligations and began procedures to withdraw from the INF Treaty pursuant to its Article XV(2).  And so it was that Russian violations killed the Treaty.

With Russia then enjoying massive superiority in theater-range nuclear systems and any countervailing U.S. capability still being many years away, it is perhaps not surprising that Russia did not return to compliance when thus pushed by the Trump Administration.  Moreover, it now seems clear that – with his invasion and annexation of Ukraine and occupation of the Donbas having elicited little more than a rueful shrug from Western leaders in 2014 – far from being deterred, Putin contemplated more regional aggression, and was indeed before long preparing what he hoped would be a decisive and final attack upon Ukraine in early 2022.

The strategic logic of needing to respond to such aggression-facilitating imbalances in nuclear capabilities, however, has not abated.  If anything, it has heightened.  Even the Biden Administration – headed by a man who as recently as January 2017 still claimed to hold out hope for declaring that there was no need for nuclear deterrence against conventional attack, and that the “sole purpose” of nuclear weapons was to deter the employment of other nuclear weapons – seems now to understand that we will at some point soon need to consider building more nuclear systems.  Already, the Biden Administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review admits that the Trump Administration’s once-controversial lower-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead (the W76-2) “strengthen[s] deterrence of limited nuclear use in a regional conflict” and “currently provides an important means to deter limited nuclear use.” 

The current NPR promises that the United States “will maintain nuclear forces that are responsive to the threats we face,” but it also concedes that the nuclear threats we face are increasing.  In fact, they are increasing so swiftly that, as noted, “[b]y the 2030s, the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as … potential adversaries.”  Especially given that it takes many years for the United States to develop and field new systems, the strategic logic that we need to do more to respond is grim and all but inexorable.

(11)     The Russians called this missile the RSD-10 “Pioneer,” and NATO called it the “Saber.”  Some SS-20s were reportedly also based in the Soviet Far East, targeting Japan, South Korea, and China.

(12)     This proposal became known as Reagan’s “zero-zero offer.” 

(13)     Unfortunately, the Biden Administration undermined those initial 2018 hopes by announcing in 2022 its commitment to canceling SCLM-N unilaterally – even while also unilaterally pledging to retire the B83 gravity bomb without either any replacement hard-target-kill capability in hand or any concession from our adversaries. 

(14)     Achieving this, however, requires that we overcome our naïve post-Cold War attachment to the teleology of progressive disarmament and get serious once more about the idea of building new systems.