Nucleotidings Blog

Nuclear Weapons 783 – The Fate Of The Nuclear-Armed Sea-Launched Cruise Missile Program Is Being Debated – Part 2 of 2 Parts

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Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     Experts continue to debate whether the U.S. would launch a full-scale retaliation against any sort of nuclear attack even if the attack involved low-yield weapons. Mercado said, “If you were the decision-maker and the president and somebody pops an EMP [electromagnetic pulse] – a low-yield EMP, or something – then would you nuke an entire country?”
     When considering any gaps in the U.S. deterrence posture, it is worth remembering that the U.S. consistently overestimated the Soviet Union’s nuclear capabilities during the first decades of the Cold War. In the 1950s, the U.S. government feared that the Soviets had more nuclear bombers than the U.S. Air Force. However, the “bomber gap” turned out to be nonexistent. Starting in 1958, future President John F. Kennedy claimed that the Soviets had more nuclear missiles than the U.S. The “missile gap” also turned out to be a fantasy. The movie Dr. Strangelove parodied this attitude in a scene in which military advisers were discussing the need for underground fallout shelters ahead of a nuclear apocalypse and an Air Force general decried, “Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!”
     There is also the question of exactly how much deterrence value the NASLCM actually has. According to an April report from the Congressional Research Service, “Critics have argued that the capabilities highlighted by advocates of NASLCM deployment — regional presence, lower yield, and discriminate attack options — would lower the threshold for nuclear use and increase the likelihood of nuclear war. They argue that by adding those capabilities to its nuclear force posture, the United States would be adopting a war-fighting posture rather than pursuing a doctrine based on deterrence.”
     Hans M. Kristensen is with the Federation of American Scientists, which is a non-profit group that seeks to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world. He says that the NASLCM might prove to be redundant because the Air Force is developing the Long-Range Standoff Weapon (LRSW). This nuclear weapon could carry warheads with yields from five to one hundred and fifty kilotons.     Kristensen said that it is likely that the NASLCM would be equipped with warheads that would deliver similar yields that could be programmed to explode in the air or on the ground. With respect to the notion that a nuclear war could be limited to low-yield nuclear weapons, Kristensen said that this idea is a “dangerous illusion.”
     Kristensen said, “There is no reason to believe that either side would back down after a few detonations but that all would escalate and seek to defeat the other side and win. Limited scenarios are created by warfighters as tactical means of achieving certain war objectives but are over-sold by theorists and advocates who try to make nuclear weapons sound more acceptable.”
     Russian President Putin has already threatened publicly to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield if Russia is losing a ground war with conventional weapons against NATO in Eastern Europe. It is reasonable for the U.S. to have low-yield nuclear weapons in its arsenal.

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