FOREWORD BY MR. PETER HUESSY
Here is the Foreword, by noted nuclear strategy expert Peter Huessy, that will be at the front of my upcoming e-book ON 21-ST CENTURY NUCLEAR DETERRENCE - Volume 1 to be published on Amazon.com this summer.
FOREWORD
Nuclear deterrence and nuclear modernization--the strategy of having the forces needed to stop bad guys from using nuclear weapons against the U.S., and the policy to keep such forces up to snuff--were central to the mission of the United States and its allies for the nearly half century of the Cold War and now the three decades of what is termed an era of great power competition. Joe Buff is a prolific writer on these subjects. His analysis is a welcome and much needed addition to the body of commentary on nuclear matters, including material produced by professional academics, the entertainment community, and U.S. government officials, both military and civilian. Like many political subjects, there is often a narrative that gets established from which conventional wisdom does not vary. In the nuclear business this involves the constant repetition that America’s nuclear deterrent policy is outdated and dangerous; that its modernization efforts are vastly too expensive; and that the current program of record being proposed annually by the past two administrations and considered by Congress is causing an arms race and unnecessary tensions with our adversaries.
Joe Buff’s book is a welcome antidote to these false narratives. Though lengthy, Buff takes the time to unwind the false narratives and then spends the time laying out the correct facts of the case. The need for clarity on nuclear matters is critical today. The entertainment industry keeps producing scare stories about nuclear conflict being imminent, because in a crisis it is assumed there is a high chance of the reckless and accidental launch of American land-based missiles triggered by a mistaken computer warning of a Russian missile attack. One episode of the NBC television drama Madame Secretary was devoted to this fairy tale, as was the documentary titled The Bomb that was shown repeatedly at the National Academy of Sciences this past year that portrayed endless nuclear explosions and a distorted commentary about the dangers of nuclear war, all aimed at portraying America’s nuclear modernization efforts as unnecessary, dangerous, and too expensive. The dominant media in the United States also reflects the entertainment culture, as any nuclear modernization effort by the United States is immediately described as “leading to an arms race,” while China and Russia and their nuclear modernization efforts--which are going forward at full throttle--receive a pass. The academic commentary is just as bad, as it echoes and reinforces the false narrative of the media and entertainment industry, with a push for eliminating all nuclear weapons (“Global Zero”) or declaring U.S. policy should be “no first use” of nuclear weapons, or even unilaterally eliminating vast swaths of our own nuclear deterrent in the assumed faith that our enemies will magically reciprocate and get rid of their weapons too!
As Buff points out, the U.S. stopped building nuclear missiles, planes, and submarines in the 1990s, and it will be almost forty years from that time to the point where the U.S. will start putting into the field our first new and replacement bomber (2029), submarine (2032), or land-based missile (2030). We are doing so, as Buff makes clear, because our submarine hulls at 42 years old cannot continue to be at sea; our land-based missiles are now 50 years old, requiring costly maintenance, and will not meet future mission requirements; while all our current bombers will not in the future be able to penetrate enemy airspace and overcome sophisticated air defenses.
Furthermore, of considerable importance are three additional factors. Russia has adopted a policy of “escalate to win” or threatening the use of nuclear weapons early in a conflict. The unilateral disarmers in the U.S. take issue with such a description, but read carefully, the Russians consider being able to sustain aggression--such as invading the Baltics, not unlike their invasions of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia--as critical to their survival as a nation. The idea that they would be the first to use nuclear weapons, but only after the U.S. was marching on Moscow, is patently absurd. Added to this Russian strategy is a massive, unprecedented modernization of Russia’s nuclear forces, including strategic and theater systems, now somewhere between 85 to 100 percent complete, and not to be finished sometime in the next decade as alleged by a recent arms control report. Second, with respect to China, the disarmament trifecta of the entertainment, academic, and political community continue to downplay the buildup of Chinese nuclear forces and the Chinese role in the proliferation of such weapons technology to Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq, Libya, and Iran.
Third, and critically important, is the additional fairy tale that the U.S. is opposed to or uninterested in arms control. Here Buff does a highly credible job explaining the limits of arms control, but more importantly how it has been the United States that has led the successful effort to reduce Soviet and now Russian nuclear weapons by multiple thousands, and that it has been Russia that walked away from the 1987 INF treaty eliminating thousands of SS-20 Soviet nuclear armed missiles. It has been Russia that has built multiple new long-range nuclear missiles that it has also declared are not covered by existing arms control treaties such as the 2010 New START agreement.
Joe Buff deals with all of these issues in great detail. His material is a must read, as it is critically important that we undo the false narratives that dominate our nuclear discourse and stick to, as the famous TV show said, “Just the facts, ma’am.”
MR. PETER HUESSY is President and Founder (1981) of defense consulting firm GeoStrategic Analysis of Potomac, Maryland. He is also an Instructor at the United States Naval Academy, on U.S. Nuclear Deterrent Policy and Strategy. Over the years, Mr. Huessy has hosted more than one thousand seminars on Capitol Hill about important aspects of national defense and strategic deterrence.