By Peter Huessy, Senior Fellow, NIDS and Warrior Maven
This loss of or not having deterrence is according to Victor Davis Hanson an absence of their being consequences for rogue behavior. To refer to just five key conflicts illustrates Hanson’s point—Russian aggression against Ukraine; the Iranian proxy Houthis war against Red Sea commercial ocean shipping; the Hamas attacks on Israel; the Mexican cartels smuggling drugs and trafficking women across the US southern border; and the Chinese military aggression against nations on the periphery of the South China Sea.
Prior to these aggressions, the US had largely not even tried deterrence, in fact in many instances seemed to explicitly take deterrence off the table. The US told Russia our reaction on Ukraine depended on how much territory Russia might grab. And after the war began, the US largely refrained from green lighting Ukraine to attack Russian territory, creating in Russia a relative sanctuary from attack.
Iran has had a hundred billion dollars freed from sanctioned accounts, largess that continued despite Iranian violations of the additional IAEA protocols and attacks on the US Navy and commercial tanker traffic while oil revenue soared.
The Houthis have forced commercial ocean-going freight traffic to virtually cease in the Red Sea, requiring shipping company’s like Maersk to voyage around the Cape, adding a forty percent premium to shipping costs, even reportedly getting GPS assistance from Russia and China to find freighter and tanker targets.
Hamas still receives billions in aid and has much of the world condemning Israel even after the horrific October 7th massacres.
The Mexican criminal cartels are getting richer and more powerful with only a very marginal US or Mexican law enforcement response.
China continues a $280 billion trade surplus with the US, steals hundreds of billions in US intellectual property, ignores a Hague tribunal ruling on the South China Sea and Philippines, while with its fentanyl trade helps annually kill through drug overdoses some 100,000 Americans.
These danger the US faces are compounded by the emerging alliance of these rogue states, particularly China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, three of whom are nuclear armed. Tom Reed in his The Nuclear Express explains how in 1982 China and Russia both secretly decided to help proliferate nuclear weapons technology to such nations as North Korea and Iran through what became known as the A. Q. Khan network in Pakistan (what might be described as a “Nukes R Us” bazaar).
Now all four of these rogues are dedicated to the use of military power to coerce or blackmail their adversaries to do their bidding, all in the service of supporting armed aggression. All are also aligned together to support terrorism, particularly driven by Iran and its terror proxies.
In thinking about restoring deterrence the US has to both advance its conventional and nuclear capability. The US Army recently concluded wargames that determined the US loses big if nuclear weapons are introduced into a conventional conflict. This is similar to findings underscored by the repeated testimony of top US military commanders, including former US Strategic Command head Admiral Charles Richard, who have concluded that “nothing holds” when nuclear weapons are introduced into a conventional conflict. This requires a top-notch theater nuclear capability to prevent the very escalation a formidable US conventional capability may trigger. Without such additional capability, the US is not in danger of just seeing tanker traffic disrupted, or more drug related deaths. Weakness could precipitate the very use of nuclear weapons by our enemies in the service of major conventional aggression, which could lead to the nuclear Armageddon our deterrent is designed to prevent.
Now critics of the current program of nuclear modernization, particularly partisans of “Global Zero” or the abolition of nuclear weapons, accuse the US under the current deterrent policy of planning “nuclear war-fighting” in deploying a better regional nuclear deterrent to stop the feared rogue state escalation, much as President Putin has serially threatened in Ukraine. China, too, threatened to nuke Japan if Tokyo came to the defense of Taiwan, promising to make Japan surrender “just as they did in World War II.” It is clear the rogue states plan to use nuclear weapons in “war-fighting”— to secure victory on a conventional battlefield to avoid defeat.
On the other hand, it is the US that is seeking to deter not just the use of nuclear weapons but also conventional weapons, as the potential for armed conflict to escalate to the nuclear level starts most likely with a conventional conflict. Far from promoting “war-fighting” the US is explicitly seeking to stop conventional conflict from beginning precisely for fear such a conflict could escalate to the nuclear level.
Now during the height of the Cold War, the American nuclear umbrella over Europe and the nations of the Western Pacific was to deter the use of conventional force by heavily armed Russia, China and North Korea, not to back up US aggression.
In short, the flip side of that historical US strategy is the current strategy of these rogue states which is not to deter the use of nuclear weapons but to use nuclear weapons or the threat of the use of nuclear weapons to coerce or blackmail the US and prevent it from stopping rogue state armed aggression.
It is critical to remember why the US nuclear deterrent policy throughout multiple administrations has been and remains these many decades, as Admiral Rich Mies, the former Commander of US Strategic Command explains, to stop aggression at any level—such as the use of biological, chemical, cyber, space and conventional weapons, not just the use of nuclear force.
But critics of US deterrent policy have embraced the idea of limiting the use of US nuclear weapons to deterring only nuclear attacks on the United States. This deterrent strategy is sometimes referred to as “sole use” (SU).
China Invades Taiwan
A companion policy also embraced by the disarmament community is “No First Use” (NFU) of nuclear weapons. Now the idea of NFU has been a long-term staple of the US disarmament community and has been supported by some senior members of the current administration.
In early 2024, China unexpectedly proposed that a NFU policy be adopted by the US and other nuclear powers. The assumption behind the idea is that if everyone agrees not to use nuclear weapons first, there is assumed no need to worry someone will use nuclear weapons second, or in retaliation because the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter the use of other nuclear weapons.
But No First Use policy is also connected to Sole Use policy. If both declaratory strategi
es could be taken seriously, [which they cannot] the United States could do away with its nuclear forces because if we truly believed the Russians or Chinese (or any other nuclear power) would never use their nuclear weapons first, and if nuclear weapons were only deployed to deter the use of nuclear weapons in the first place, then the US could simply, safely and unilaterally get rid of its nuclear weapons. A sort of Global Zero made easy!
Ohio States Woody Hayes said that the problem with a forward pass were that only three things could happen, two of them bad. The pass could be caught, intercepted or incomplete. In reality, four things could happen if the US adopted a strategy of No First Use, all of them bad. First, our allies would think we had given up on their defense. Second, our allies might then decide to build their own nuclear weapons, spurring proliferation. Third, Russia and China wouldn’t believe our change in policy was real. And fourth, they would lie about adopting such a strategy, and use nuclear weapons first anyway!
Another key factor is a nuclear free would not necessarily be a “war free” world. Since 1945, for example, the nuclear age appears to have reduced the deaths from war by 16-fold, from roughly an average of 8000 to 500 a day. One expert argues that the rise of free enterprise and reductions in poverty, industrial civilization itself, and international institutions contributed to the decline. But as an NDU study concluded, nuclear deterrence transformed the way global relations operate, thus accounting for much of the decline.
A NFU or SU policy adoption would put the marked decline in annual deaths from armed conflict in jeopardy. As was discussed on the John Batchelor CBS radio show “Eye on the World” recently, the Chinese NFU proposal earlier in 2024 is a trick to make more tenable China’s push for nuclear coercion, as the Posture Commission predicted.
Taking nuclear force off the table would allow the CCP to fight to take control over Taiwan using a range of force—cyber, space, conventional or biological—without fear that the US and its allies might retaliate with nuclear weapons.
Furthermore, China is also saying that NFU has to be adopted because any conventional conflict might very well escalate to the nuclear level. Like Putin, China can bully the US and always threaten to use nuclear weapons should its conventional aggression not succeed o to keep the US out of the fight to begin with.
On top of which a NFU policy places some Chinese forces on the mainland in a sanctuary due to the absence of US long range conventional strike capability.
Now top US military officials also know the Chinese NFU proposals are a trick and have strongly urge the US not to go there. The US needs to sustain and improve its nuclear deterrent to regain the deterrent order created by US success in ending the Soviet Empire. Ideas such as no “First and Sole” use of nuclear weapons threatens to markedly undermine deterrence, just at a time when the US is facing growing nuclear threats and an increasingly costly legacy deterrent force that must soon be replaced.
