ICBMS and Nuclear Warfighting

Video Above: A Conversation with Peter Huessy, Senior Warrior Maven Nuclear Weapons Analyst

By Peter Huessy, President of Geo-Strategic Analysis, Potomac, Maryland and Warrior Maven, Nuclear Weapons, Senior Analyst 

The oft repeated maxim that a nuclear war should never be fought and can’t be won, most recently reiterated by Russian President Putin, raises the issue of whether any nuclear weapons are useful for deterrence. If you cannot fight a war with any nuclear weapon, what’s the point of keeping any of them around even if only for a retaliatory strike? It cannot be that just ICBMs, for example, are not useable to “fight” a war, as some critics have claimed, because submarine or bomber carried nuclear weapons are just as powerful and destructive.

Perhaps the concern is that ICBMs can only be used if they are used to start a war, as otherwise an attacker like Russia, for example, could shoot first and try and destroy all of our 450 land-based missiles in their silos prior to their retaliatory launch. This is in contrast to our stealthy submarines at sea that can survive an attack and still be available for a retaliatory strike, what is known as having an “assured retaliatory deterrent.”

Ironically, Professor von Hippel of Princeton, a key advocate for killing the ICBM leg of our nuclear TRIAD because of a feared Russian pre-emptive first strike on our ICBM silos, wrote confidently in 1977 and then again in 1986 that there would be no rationale behind such a feared Soviet first strike as identified in 1974-5 by Defense Secretary James Schlesinger as a “window of vulnerability.” Particularly important is that this “window” was a key part of Ronald Reagan’s national security platform in his campaigns in 1976 and 1980 for the Presidency.

Von Hippel dismissed the idea that the US faced any nuclear window of vulnerability. His logic was as follows: given between 23-45 million Americans would perish after even a limited Soviet counter-force strike against US nuclear forces such as on our more than 1000 ICBM silos, no sane Soviet leader would order such an attack as such huge casualties would guarantee an angry US President would be compelled to order a massive US retaliatory strike. This assumption of a guaranteed and massive US counter strike, argued von Hippel, would dissuade the Soviets from doing anything so reckless.

Today, however, with Ukraine conflict, a much more limited Russian nuclear first strike is feared, as President Putin has explicitly threatened NATO with a nuclear attack some thirty five times.