The Nuclear Delusion At The Heart Of The 2022 National Defense Strategy

On March 28, the Biden administration delivered its classified National Defense Strategy (NDS) to Congress. The White House simultaneously released a bare-bones factsheet to the public setting forth the basic framework of the strategy.

The 2022 NDS provides foundational guidance for U.S. military preparations, largely repeating the priorities of the Trump 2018 strategy in emphasizing military threats posed by other great powers—i.e., China and Russia.

Like the Trump strategy, the Biden strategy will remain mostly secret. However, with regard to the greatest military threat the nation faces, nuclear war, there’s no need to wait for a more detailed public exposition of where the Pentagon is headed, because we knew that the day Joe Biden was elected.

The nation will continue to sustain a “triad” of nuclear forces capable of retaliating in a measured way to any level of nuclear aggression, while limiting its active defenses of the homeland to the defeat of a North Korean attack.

In other words, the strategic posture defined by the Biden NDS will make no effort to actually defend the U.S. against a Chinese or Russian nuclear attack, instead opting to rely on the threat of massive retaliation to deter great-power aggression.

What this means in practical terms is that if either country launches more than a handful of nuclear weapons against U.S. cities, those weapons are sure to reach their targets.

This is the posture that successive U.S. governments have espoused since Joe Biden first came to the Senate in 1973, and it is one of the few areas of public policy where the president has been consistent in his convictions throughout his entire public life.

Unfortunately, the durability of the current and planned nuclear posture isn’t testable: deterrence is a state of mind, and we don’t know on any given day what Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping is thinking.

The only unambiguous test we have of whether nuclear deterrence is working is when it fails. Other indications are subject to conflicting interpretation.

The central assumption of the strategy, that nuclear deterrence can be made to work indefinitely by threatening consequences, is unprovable and ahistorical.

After all, the threat of unimaginable destruction isn’t just a potent deterrent; it is also a powerful inducement to attack if the aggressor thinks it can remove the threat in a surprise attack.

The strategy that was delivered to the White House on March 28 attempts to anticipate every eventuality that might lead to nuclear aggression by China or Russia, and provide compelling reasons for not doing so.

But this could prove to be a delusion, a failure of imagination similar to the circumstances surrounding the 9/11 attacks, in which the nation is left unprepared for easily imaginable crises.

Russia has repeatedly invoked its nuclear arsenal since annexing the Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and its threats have become more frequent with the current invasion.

Maybe it’s just a bluff, maybe it isn’t. What we know for sure is that if Moscow launched its weapons, Washington would have few options other than to retaliate in kind.

That would be cold comfort on the day that American civilization as we have come to know it faced extinction.

President Biden and other members of the policymaking community arrived at this improbable posture because they did not believe, half a century ago, that it was possible to defend against a large-scale nuclear attack.

Being defenseless was subsequently elevated to the status of a virtue in achieving strategic stability, since it was assumed any effort to actually defend against nuclear attack would lead to a further buildup of offensive capabilities by the other side.

The nation would thus find itself in an arms race that the defense was unlikely to win. Biden alludes to this possibility in his March 2021 Interim National Security Strategic Guidance (page 13), confirming in effect that his approach to nuclear strategy hasn’t changed since Richard Nixon was in in the White House.

However, the Biden posture only works when the adversary is a rational, deliberative actor, and there are plenty of players on the global stage on any given day who don’t fit that description.

Consider a few questions bearing upon the long-term viability of our current nuclear strategy.

How would the strategy deal with an irrational or deluded adversary that is not deterrable? In some cases, it can’t.

How would the strategy deal with a rational adversary that believes it is facing nuclear attack? Warning systems fail periodically, and if you don’t launch promptly, you could risk losing your deterrent.

How would the strategy deal with a regional conflict that escalates to nuclear exchanges? Russian commentators keep bringing up this possibility, but many U.S. “experts” act as though it isn’t a plausible scenario.

How would the strategy deal with a command breakdown leading to accidental nuclear launch? There isn’t much we could do without some form of active defense.

How would the strategy deal with the seizure of nuclear launch sites by radical elements? Internal strife leading to a loss of nuclear control in Russia is a scenario that seldom gets attention.

The point of these questions is to highlight the ways in which the nuclear posture proposed in the 2022 National Defense Strategy might lead to catastrophe.

That doesn’t mean we should give up on the nuclear triad, but the nation needs a backup if deterrence fails, and at the moment it doesn’t have one.

The Biden plan calls for spending barely one-percent of the world’s biggest defense budget—40% of global military spending—on active defense against the only existential threat to our republic.

The Pentagon doesn’t even research how it would cope with a large-scale nuclear attack, and the military services are more concerned with preserving their conventional warfighting capabilities.

But is that really the right alignment of priorities for the years ahead?