What Does Oppenheimer Teach About Nuclear Deterrence?

By Peter Huessy, Warrior Senior Nuclear Weapons Analyst, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute

The new movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the top scientists running the Manhattan project often credited with building the first atomic bomb, has spawned much commentary and analysis about the US current nuclear deterrent, the nuclear balance with Russia and China, and whether nuclear abolition should be seriously pursued.

One such essay (“The Long Shadow of Oppenheimer’s Trinity Test”) by Jack Detsch, the national security reporter at Foreign Policy and Anusha Rathi, also with Foreign Policy, published July 23, 2023, makes two central points. The first is that the massive use of nuclear weapons would devastate much of the world, trigger global winter and possibly killing five billion people. The second calls into question the credibility of the US deterrent to prevent nuclear war, and the need alternatively through a campaign of Global Zero to get Russia and China to join the US in “disarmament talks.”

Ironically, the current disarmament campaign actually makes the use of nuclear weapons more likely as funding cuts and delays pushed by global zero advocates often undermine the very US deterrent that for seventy-five years has avoided the Armageddon the disarmament groups fear will someday occur. And while a major nuclear war could indeed destroy much of civilization, the limited use of nuclear weapons under a strategy of “escalate to win” has been adopted by Russia and China, the leaders of which believe such a war can be waged and “won,” despite their “dezinformatsiya” to the contrary.

Detsch/Rathi contend the US spends far too much on nuclear deterrence, but then acknowledge that much of the nuclear industry that makes up the nuclear infrastructure, for example, is indeed “falling into despair,” what former CSIS/PONI Director Clark Murdock once described as “rusting to obsolescence.” Ironically, it has been the global zero advocates that for multiple decades refused to adequately fund a modernized nuclear deterrent, thus leading to the significant aging of US legacy nuclear systems and infrastructure that now costs so much to sustain.

Detsch and Rathi complain the Biden administration is unnecessarily pursuing an “arms race” with a planned more than $1 trillion nuclear modernization effort, which they blame on “Pentagon hawks” as if the Administration and Congress have no role in the current program of record now proceeding into its 14th year.

But far from starting an arms race, all of the US strategic nuclear modernization effort is entirely consistent with the 2010 New START arms control treaty, as the US will build no more than the 700 allowed SNDVs or strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, and actually achieve a reduction in sub-launched nuclear armed missiles as we move from the Ohio class submarine carrying 20 missiles to the Columbia class submarine carrying 16 missiles.