By Peter Huessy, Senior Warrior Nuclear Weapons Analyst
For most of the nuclear age nuclear weapons were thought by the West to be instruments of deterrence, to prevent war. Today, over time, the criminal enterprises such as Russia, China, and North Korea, that masquerade as legitimate nation-states, see nuclear weapons as instruments of coercion and blackmail. This unnerving point was underscored by the unanimous October 2023 Strategic Posture Commission report and echoed by another new Congressionally initiated report on the National Security Strategy of the United States just issued in July 2024.
On the anniversary of the use of two nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of World War II, it’s appropriate to examine again whether President Truman made the right decision. Most analysis treats Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki as unnecessary at best and even criminal at worst, as solely a political move to intimidate the USSR, detract from Moscow’s role in defeating the Japanese and to show folks who was boss. On top of which, it is often claimed the Japanese government was ready to surrender, primarily as it anticipated a coming blockade of the homeland. In short, no such use of nuclear weapons was necessary.
As part of the almost ritualistic assessment of Truman’s decision, this year saw a slight twist in the assessments. A new poll was taken using word for word the same questions Roper polls used in 1945 to test American attitudes toward the use of nuclear weapons. One analysis led by Scott Sagan was disappointed most Americans actually support a strong and robust deterrent, as well as generally supporting the Truman decision to end WW2 by using nuclear weapons.
Such polls also show a public resistant to accepting the idea of lessening the salience of nuclear deterrence in US security policy. And that any such policy would also have to persuade Russia and China to lessen the role of nuclear weapons in their security strategies, a prospect not even far over the horizon let alone possible in the near-term.
In fact, the very opposite is occurring. Over two decades ago, Russia issued a 1999 directive to develop low-yield, highly accurate, battlefield nuclear weapons, a plan implemented by Russian President Putin. China also has built over 300 new ICBM silos just in the past few years and is now beginning to fill the silos with two types of missiles—which can each carry 3-10 warheads.
Projections by James Howe are that around 2035-45, Russia could have 7000+ deployed strategic long-range nuclear warheads, while Chris Yeaw of the University of Nebraska projects China and Russia together could easily have 10,000 deployed nuclear weapons by 2035-40.
In the face of such numbers, what sense does it make to assume nuclear US restraint will be mirrored by China and Russia when the two latter countries have been building new nuclear weapon systems for between 10-20 years? And have even accelerated the pace of their acquisition to where the recently retired commander of the US Strategic Command described China’s nuclear growth as “breathtaking.”
