Nuclear Deterrence Without ICBMs? Might Not Work

By Peter Huessy, President, Geostrategic Analysis, Senior Fellow, The Hudson Institute

(Washington DC) Deterrence is holding at risk or targeting what the bad guy’s value. That includes the leadership of their country, their military assets including their nuclear weaponry, and their industrial capability to sustain and build weapons. Without weapons, the hegemonic ambitions of US enemies cannot be achieved, and thus if destroyed, deterrence holds.

Deterrence

The alternative is to bomb the cities of the bad guys and incinerate millions of people who have no role in the decision of their totalitarian nations to start wars and plan aggression, and whose destruction would have no impact on the weapons with which such nations go to war. Cities do not launch missiles at the United States—but submarines, bombers and ICBM launchers do. Not holding at risk or targeting such weapons leaves them in sanctuary where they can strike America and her allies with impunity.

The extent to which the United States must hold at risk such weapons is an important function of deterrence. Leaving large swaths of an adversary’s weaponry free from attack risks such a nation taking undue risks and launching attacks against the US and its allies pre-emptively. Thus, the proposal on April 28th by Gerald Marsh, a former physicist with the Argonne National Laboratory and consultant on nuclear weapons technology to eliminate the entirety of the US ICBM force—and to do so unilaterally—is highly puzzling.

Video Above: Peter Huessy, Senior Warrior Maven Nuclear Weapons Analyst discusses why deterrence may be the best solution to prevent nuclear war

ICMBs

The central argument made is that the high accuracy of the D-5 submarine launched ballistic missile makes the ICBM force superfluous. Marsh claims the Navy Ohio class subs have enough warheads to hold at risk all the Russian and Chinese forces necessary to preserve deterrence, despite the decision of every President since 1962 to deploy, sustain and modernize the US ICBM force, now consisting of 450 ICBM missiles and launch facilities. As Marsh claims, eliminating ICBMs can be done without “compromising US capability to destroy all current nuclear targets.

But Marsh goes even further and resurrects a common ghost story that since ICBMs are in fixed silos, the Russian can target the missiles for destruction. In a crisis, it is assumed Russian might launch early to take them out, and a US President, worrying about not having the ICBMs available, would launch even quicker and get in the first punch.