It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything in my “President and the Bomb” series. You can read part I, II, and III if you are interested). It’s not that I’ve been inactive; much to the contrary, I’ve been researching this issue as one of my major research agendas, but most of that work has not yet seen the light of day. You can read a version of my work on comparative nuclear command and control schemes here, to give you a flavor of it. (Perhaps ironically, the more I am researching something professionally, the less likely it is to appear on the blog, because I’m tailoring it for other venues.)

The recent weeks’ events — allegedly Iranian attack on the US Embassy in Iraq, the assassination of General Suleimani, and the retaliation by Iranian forces on US military bases in Iraq — have me (like everyone else who is not a warmonger) feeling uneasy. Not only because it looks like careless escalation, but because it fits well into how I’ve been thinking about what one of the most probable “next use” of nuclear weapons might be, and what a lot of our existing “presidential control” gets wrong, in my opinion.

Usually the question of “whose finger should be on the button” is framed in terms of what is sometimes called the “crazy President problem.” This is not a reference to the current President (except when it is meant that deliberately); it’s an imagined scenario that goes like this: the US President wakes up one day, and, out of the blue, decides to start thermonuclear war. Do the generals comply? (Note that some of the other characters sometimes introduced into this — like “Does the Secretary of Defense refuse?” — are red herrings, because they are not strictly in the chain of command. See my Part III post.)

I get the rhetorical attraction of this way of framing the issue: it makes the issue of unilateral nuclear control very acute. But it’s not very realistic. Why not? Because a) that isn’t how mental illness works (it tends not to flare up in a totally unexpected way among otherwise “sane” people), and b) this is actually the easiest form of this problem to refute. Because a general can say, well, if a nuclear use order came “out of context” — this is their term, and means “out of the blue, without any threat against us” — then of course they would refuse it. Which I more or less believe is true, if you imagine this scenario happening at all.

A much more probable scenario for US nuclear first use, for me, looks like this: a crisis builds in a region where there have historically been crises. There are legitimate security threats from and in that region. Something happens that pushes the President to want to respond with something “big.” The military gives him their standard three options (something bland, something insane, something sensible) with the hope it will force a sensible choice. Sound familiar so far? This is what the reporting on the Suleimani assassination says actually happened.

At this point we ask, would “the extreme option” ever be something like a nuclear attack? I very much doubt that it would be what most people think a nuclear option would look like (“wipe country X off the map”). Aside from being unambiguously a war crime (even by the quite flexible standards used by the military to evaluate strikes as war crimes), it just doesn’t match with my perception of how the military (from what little I know of them) think about how nuclear weapons might be plausibly used. So I don’t worry about that.

Could the “extreme option” be, “use a low-yield, high-accuracy nuclear weapon against an underground, unambiguously military site, that is relatively isolated from civilians?” Now we’re getting much more plausible. Most people, I think, would not consider something like this to be a good idea — we’re trained, rightly or wrongly, to see nuclear weapons as being inherently “large,” as things that necessarily kill many civilians, and that any first use would spiral out of control. Whether those things are true or not, there are plenty of analysts in academia, think tanks, and the military itself who do not see things this way. They believe nuclear escalation can be avoided, that nukes could just be another tool for the job, and that a low-yield, high-accuracy nuclear weapon (like the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb, or the proposed Low-Yield Trident) would be useful not only as deterrents for tactical weapon use by another nation (which is to say, Russia), but as tools for both sending a big-but-not-crazy message and for destroying deeply fortified underground facilities.

Now there are many good reasons to think that the tradition of non-use for nuclear weapons is a good thing and should be perpetuated as long as possible. The US benefits from non-use more than it would benefit from use becoming normalized to any extent, as the JASON group concluded during the Vietnam War, when there were rumblings that tactical nuclear weapons might improve the US military situation. The US and its military are far more vulnerable to tactical nuclear weapons than many of our enemies (because we tend to centralize our forces), and we have the largest and most advanced conventional military in the world, and so we can afford to eschew low-yield nuclear use. (Remember that our Cold War interest in low-yield nukes was because we felt that the Soviets had overwhelming conventional forces. That’s not the case anymore — we’re the one’s with the overwhelming conventional forces, and so we’re the ones that other nations would be tempted to use low-yield nuclear weapons against, as an “equalizer.”)

I have met some of the scholars and analysts who think low-yield nuclear use might be not a horrible idea (they might not say it was a good idea), and I don’t have any problem with said people as people. I can even see their way of thinking, because I’m a historian of science and I’m trained to be sympathetic to nearly any point of view. I can’t tell how many of these people actually think low-yield nuclear use would be a good idea, and how many of them are being academically contrarian because the bulk of academic thought on nuclear weapons supports the idea that they shouldn’t be used. I respect academic contrarians (they keep us on our feet, and skepticism is useful), but in the context of actual policy I think such ideas might actually be dangerous, because the people “at the top” might not realize how academia works, and that contrarian arguments might sound appealing but there are frequently reasons that they are, in fact, not believed by most people who study these topics.

So, to return to the thread, could a low-yield nuclear strike be included among the “extreme” options in such a hypothetical scenario? I think the answer is maybe, though I would still put that as unlikely — but it’s going to depend who draws up the menu of options. As we’ve seen in the last few years, the assumption that high-profile policymakers are all qualified for their positions, are not zealots, do not have views widely out of line with any form of consensus politics, etc., is totally unwarranted. So it’s possible, though it would be extreme indeed.

But what if, during this same set of options, someone whispers into the President’s ear, “what if we did that plan I mentioned the other day?” That is, what if there was a senior White House advisor who somehow got it into their head that a low-yield nuclear weapon would be a good idea, had talked about it previously to the President, and then injected it into the discussion? Might the President bring it up himself? And in that context, would the generals go along with it?

I have little doubt that the generals would probably try to persuade the President that this was a bad idea. I suspect the President’s senior cabinet would also try to do so, though I am less certain about this. But what if the President insisted on the nuclear option?

This isn’t a “crazy President” situation. This is a “the President is advocating for something that there are actually many rational arguments in favor of, in a context that might plausibly justify it” situation. That doesn’t mean it’s not a bad idea, one that could lead to a lot of long-term grief for the United States. But there’s a difference between a “bad order” and “an order that can be legally disobeyed.”

This is why low-yield weapons make me uncomfortable. Not just because they might “lower the threshold of nuclear use,” the common objection to them. It’s also because they can “remove the ability of the military to refuse to follow an awful order.” A low-yield nuclear weapon, on an accurate delivery vehicle, might plausibly kill very few civilians if used against an isolated target. It wouldn’t necessarily fall outside any of the guidelines of proportionality, and for certain types of targets (again, underground bunkers and facilities) you can make a plausible argument to their military necessity relative to conventional weapons (they increase your chance of success dramatically). I think the military would have a very hard time refusing such an order. Even if they knew it was a bad idea, one that would hurt America diplomatically and, in the long term, militarily.

It sometimes surprises people that when I rank my “most plausible chances for the next nuclear weapons use since Nagasaki,” the idea of the US using one is perhaps the top of the list. This isn’t because I think ill of the country, or even because it is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons in war. It’s because I’ve talked to, and listened to, enough analysts (military and civilian) to get the feeling that there are a non-trivial number of voices out there who think nukes are “usable,” and that in a system where you only need to convince a single person (the President of the United States) of that point of view, then the possibility of them being used is a lot higher than you might think. (My other main “plausible scenarios” are basically “conventional stand-off with Russia leads to Russia using tactical nuclear weapons in combat” and “North Korea thinks we are going to decapitate them so they attack first“; the likelihood of any of these depends, as always, on the context).

This is why, in my ideal world, I’d like there to be some kind of additional checks in place on the use of nuclear weapons. At some future point I’ll outline what I think an “ideal system” ought to look like (and I’ll write something on whether No First Use gets us there; I’ve got a post on the history of No First Use proposals in the works), but for now I’ll just say that we need to think not only in terms of massive attacks or “crazy Presidents,” but about the pernicious and highly-plausible (if history is any guide) possibility of somebody with just a bit of bad reasoning in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Tags: 2010s, 2020s, Bad ideas, Command and control, Donald Trump, President and the Bomb, War plans