US Must Plan for Nuke Wars (Scary)

[Nikki Stone1]

http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/10/28/us-must-plan-for-nuke-wars/

US Must Plan for Nuke Wars
By Greg Grant Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 4:15 pm
Posted in Intelligence, International, Policy

While nuclear disarmament remains a noble aspiration, the world is going in the other direction, that is, more states with more nukes, says CSBA President Andrew Krepinevich in a new report, US Nuclear Forces: Meeting the Challenge of a Proliferated World. From four nuclear states in the 1960s, there are now double that number (adding China, Israel, India and Pakistan) and we may soon reach ten (North Korea and Iran). Potential enemies have learned they can’t survive a conventional war in the face of the U.S. precision strike arsenal. In their strategic calculus, the only means of deterring U.S. military action is a nuclear weapon.

He describes the “Second Nuclear Regime,” where proliferation has moved from advanced industrial powers, centered around the U.S. and Europe, to emerging Asian states, such as India, Pakistan and North Korea, with more to follow: Iran, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria. A nuclear armed Iran would likely be a proliferation “tipping point,” where the barriers to proliferation disappear altogether, producing a domino-effect as Arab states wanting “peaceful” nuclear power, what Krepinevich calls the “starter kit” for nuclear weapons, accelerate weaponization efforts.

In such a world, strategists and military leaders must go further than just ruminating about how deterrence theory can be jerry rigged to fit a larger set of nuke wielding actors. Military planners must prepare to fight on a day-after-nuclear-explosion battlefield, he says, a warfighting environment (including radioactive contamination and potential second strike) of such complexity and potential cost, it renders obsolete many basic tenets of U.S. military power projection. How for example, do you locate your primary fighter strike force at bases in the Gulf, such as Doha, within easy range of Iran’s nuclear tipped missiles?

After having observed the importance American commanders placed on “force protection” when faced with guerrillas armed with roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where those same commanders would send troops into harms way against a nuclear armed opponent. Yet, as Krepinevich points out, if, as is likely, proliferation becomes reality, the U.S. cannot be frozen out of options by the threat of nuclear strike. Somehow, policymakers and military commanders must be provided options for strategic maneuver, even with the threat of nuclear attack hanging over their heads....

[TheWraith]

1. A couple of retorts to this.

One: yes, the concept of a real war using nuclear weapons isn't as far fetched as people might think. India and Pakistan are the most likely offenders here, either against each other, or it's vaguely possible that if Pakistan fell to a military coup again, some expansionist general might see dropping some nukes in Iran and rolling across the border as an easy way to relieve Pakistan's problems of overcrowding and poverty.

However, I don't think these scenarios are something that necessitates a military plan from us. Unless we can design something that will knock down short and medium range missiles in flight--which is an even taller order than destroying an ICBM, which we still have problems with--we can't stop India and Pakistan from depopulating each other if they really want to.

Second, I don't see a nuke as a major deterrent to US precision strikes, because being able to build a warhead is only a third of the problem. The two other chunks are delivering it somewhere, and the public relations fallout. Suppose that Iran developed a nuke, and retaliated against US bombings by vaporizing Diego Garcia. What would the world opinion be? Chances are it would be uniformly negative, since going from conventional to nuclear warfare is not a proportional response. And it only gets worse if someone targeted a civilian population center.

The only thing that we can really do about the situation is maintain good diplomats, and sometimes beg bully and bribe other countries into keeping their military escapades in their pants.

[Nikki Stone1]

2. I agree with you about good diplomacy but

knowing what I know of army thinking, they feel helpless unless they can prepare for any contingency. That is why escalation happens in the first place.

:scared:

[anigbrowl]

4. That's not a bad thing

You don't want to be the slave of your plans, but on the other hand if you're in a crunch situation you want to use your available time to choose between possible options, rather than than researching to find out what your options are. Lack of preparation is just as dangerous as over-eagerness.

[Nikki Stone1]

5. No, I get it.

It's just that the ante has been so upped, you have to wonder...

[anigbrowl]

6. Oh, I see what you mean.

I don't worry about this as much as I used to...my rough feeling is that larger weapons lead to more diffuse and smaller wars - not pleasant ones, to be sure, but but a far cry from the apocalyptic possibilities in a conflict between primaries.

[Nikki Stone1]

8. That has certainly been the experience up until now.

But the threat of the large weapons can lead to all kinds of blackmail.

[anigbrowl]

3. Well, the nature of military planning is such that you hope not use those plans

But you do have to plan for the worst (which you can predict) so that if it occurs you're not completely confused about what to do. I'm sure we have a bunch of different plans that cover everything from civil war to space invaders...it's the military's job to put together and maintain standby plans for such contingencies.

[ConcernedCanuk]

7. USA dropped nukes on defenseless civilians decades ago.

.
.
.

USA has messed with politics in over half the World's countries since then, mostly by flexing their military might.

Does anyone in the USA really comprehend the word "payback"??

The rest of the World does.

count on it.

[proteus_lives]

11. More eye-rolling anti-US garbage from CC.

:eyes:

BTW, we didn't drop those nukes for shits and giggles, we dropped them to end WWII. Of course if you lived back then you'd probably have been rooting for the Axis.

"Does anyone in the USA really comprehend the word "payback"??"

What about the UK? They messed with the world for well over a century, how much "payback" do they deserve? What portion of that payback belongs to Canada? Your country was an elite, white member of the British empire. Their troops enforced British dominion. What about France? Russia? Germany? China? Japan? Italy? Turkey? How much payback do they deserve?

Would you be as eager for payback on those countries as well?

[Obamanaut]

13. Perhaps the Japanese learned about "payback" a little themselves.

Recall the more than 300,000 Chinese slaughtered in Nanjing, China by the Japanese. These were, in large part, civilians. http://www.centurychina.com/wiihist/njmassac/index.html

It is true that many were killed in Hiroshima and Nakasaki. It is also true that there have been massive killings upon one group by another group throughout the history of mankind.

And, if one believes the mythology of various religions, even atrocities inflicted upon civilians by the very gods they worshipped. Hard to get some "payback" there however.

[TheWraith]

17. For that matter, conventional bombing raids killed many more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Just in the last 7 months of the war, firebombing raids on Japan killed as many as 500,000 people. Yet those deaths are somehow considered more moral than those effected by nuclear bombing.

I would have to say that the dead probably don't care that much whether the fireball they were incinerated in was nuclear or not.

[Warpy]

9. Oh, goody, more DOMINOES. Paranoid righties love their dominoes.

As Libya found out, even when somebody gives you the plans and some of the hardware, making and maintaining a nuclear arsenal is a massive undertaking. I can see more smaller powers preferring to play a sort of blackmail, collecting favors and funds for not fully developing the technology they have into functioning weapons.

In any case, I'm not as frightened about a few small powers in the Middle East having a few weapons as I am about major powers possessing overkill.

[Octafish]

10. What's also scary is the willingness some have to use them. Like the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1963.

DCI Allen Dulles, JCS Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and the rest of the Pentagon brass recommended the United States launch a sneak attack against the Soviet Union. Col. Howard Burris recorded the 1962 meeting in a memo.

Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?

Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.

James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell | September 21, 1994

During the early 1960s the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) introduced the world to the possibility of instant total war. Thirty years later, no nation has yet fired any nuclear missile at a real target. Orthodox history holds that a succession of defensive nuclear doctrines and strategies -- from "massive retaliation" to "mutual assured destruction" -- worked, almost seamlessly, to deter Soviet aggression against the United States and to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.

The possibility of U.S. aggression in nuclear conflict is seldom considered. And why should it be? Virtually nothing in the public record suggests that high U.S. authorities ever contemplated a first strike against the Soviet Union, except in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or that they doubted the deterrent power of Soviet nuclear forces. The main documented exception was the Air Force Chief of Staff in the early 1960s, Curtis LeMay, a seemingly idiosyncratic case.

But beginning in 1957 the U.S. military did prepare plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R., based on our growing lead in land-based missiles. And top military and intelligence leaders presented an assessment of those plans to President John F. Kennedy in July of 1961. At that time, some high Air Force and CIA leaders apparently believed that a window of outright ballistic missile superiority, perhaps sufficient for a successful first strike, would be open in late 1963.

The document reproduced opposite is published here for the first time. It describes a meeting of the National Security Council on July 20, 1961. At that meeting, the document shows, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, and others presented plans for a surprise attack. They answered some questions from Kennedy about timing and effects, and promised further information. The meeting recessed under a presidential injunction of secrecy that has not been broken until now.

CONTINUED...

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_the_us_military_plan_a_nuclear_first_strike_for_1963

President Kennedy said, "No" to them. Thank God.

[proteus_lives]

12. As long as there have been General Staffs, there have been plans.

That sound horrifying to the civilian mind but make sense to the military one.

Nations have always planned for every contingency. But it can become too set in stone. In WWI hundreds of thousands died on both sides because the leaderships couldn't adapt from the plans they had spent decades on.

I think and hope that our military learns that have plans is great but you must be ready to adapt at a moment's notice.

[Vidar]

14. A spectacular update of the brilliant thinking that brought us the War to End All Wars (WWI).

[Zorro]

15. The bigger worry is nukes ending up in the hands of NGOs

Perhaps aided and abetted by some adversary government.

[Skip Intro]

16. Sadly, I don't see how the world avoids a nuclear war. It seems inevitable to me.

You can't put toothpaste back into the tube. The technology will spread, as technology does. As the number of states that have nukes increases, the likelihood of use increases. Eventually a conflict will arise in which one party will come to see that their defeat looms, and out of desperation will reach for its last ditch option. Then, of course, would come the response. I have no idea if this will happen in our lifetimes, but that it will happen seems a foregone conclusion.

Kids in a playground spat to war between nations - the darker side of human nature takes control from time to time, and actions are taken in the heat of the moment, players blinded by anger and fear and pride to larger consequence.