Charles Glaser, “The End of MAD? Technological Innovation and the Future of Nuclear Retaliatory Capabilities” in Journal of Strategic Studies

ABSTRACT
This article motivates the special issue, explaining the new debate over whether emerging technologies – including small satellites, machine learning, cyber weapons, and quantum technologies – will enable major powers to undermine each others’ nuclear retaliatory capabilities. The first article analyzes key relevant emerging technologies. Following articles explore how emerging technologies will influence the vulnerability of mobile missiles, ballistic missile submarines, and nuclear command-and-control; and the ability of missile defenses against intercontinental range missiles. The final article explores China’s views on the requirements of nuclear deterrence. Overall, the articles suggest that U.S. prospects for achieving a damage-limitation capability are poor and declining.

For most of the Cold War there was a near consensus that economically and technologically advanced countries could maintain large, survivable nuclear forces even in the face of an intense arms race. A variety of factors favored retaliatory capabilities, including the potential to build very large numbers of highly destructive warheads; the relative ease of hiding submarines at sea and of hardening land-based missile silos; and the unsolvable technical challenges that undermined the effectiveness of ballistic missile defenses in an interactive competition. In addition, a relatively small number of nuclear weapons – in the tens or low hundreds – could inflict truly catastrophic, potentially society-destroying, levels of damage. As a result, even if only a small fraction of a large nuclear arsenal could survive, the remaining retaliatory potential would be enormous and adequate to provide an ‘assured destruction capability’.Footnote1 Major-power nuclear powers that competed to deny each other an assured destruction capability would nevertheless end up in a condition of mutual assured destruction – MAD, no matter how hard they tried to escape. MAD is not a strategy, but rather this condition of mutual extremely high vulnerability to nuclear retaliatory attacks.

Cold War analysis of U.S. nuclear strategy focused on understanding the implications of MAD. Among the key findings were that targeting nuclear forces made little sense because undermining the adversary’s assured destruction capability was infeasible; the relative size of countries’ nuclear forces did not matter in MAD – instead only the absolute size of survivable forces should influence deterrence and crisis stability; bargaining and crisis outcomes would be determined by states’ resolve – the extent of their interest in the outcome – not by the particulars of their nuclear forces; limited nuclear options were the key nuclear tools for bargaining and these options should target what the adversary values, not its nuclear forces; and, all-out nuclear war was most likely to result if one country believed the other was preparing to launch a large nuclear attack and therefore launched a full counterforce attack to protect itself.Footnote2 The arguments that explained that major-power nuclear competitors would end up in MAD and that explained the implications of MAD are now commonly referred to as the ‘Theory of the Nuclear Revolution’ (TNR).

-Charles Glaser

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From the Journal of Strategic Studies