By Kyle Balzer
The largest and most destructive nuclear weapons always grab the headlines. Week after week, news items emerge concerning China’s rapid buildup of intercontinental-range nuclear missiles and Russia’s development of “exotic” systems of comparable reach. It makes sense that these long-range strategic capabilities garner so much attention, as they can rain down nuclear warheads on the American homeland from the depths of the Eurasian landmass. But the shorter-range theater nuclear forces of China and Russia have grown steadily as well, and they demand a rethink of US nuclear force posture across the globe.
Even if these shorter-range weapons can’t reach the American homeland, Beijing and Moscow could still wield them to isolate Washington’s nonnuclear-armed allies and then bully them into submission. The ongoing debate about how to adjust US nuclear posture to meet these threats is focused disproportionately on strategic forces. This should change.
Not all nuclear weapons play the same role. Based in the continental United States, America’s strategic forces alone instill in allies little confidence that Washington has their back. America’s theater forces, on the other hand, do a great deal of reassuring, as they are forward deployed in or around allied territory. Their geographic proximity helps convince allies that Washington has them covered.
As China’s and Russia’s strategic forces cast a darkening shadow across the US homeland, allies will wonder whether America’s own strategic forces have been neutralized and, in the long run, will likely come to expect more from US theater forces. Indeed, many already are expecting more from them—or at least, they are sending Washington veiled signals that change is needed to offset the growth in China’s and Russia’s shorter-range capabilities.
None of this should come as a surprise—especially now that the Trump administration has assumed a seemingly adversarial position with its NATO allies. Deterrence experts warn that the most likely pathway to nuclear warfare is not an adversary employing strategic forces in a bolt-from-the-blue attack on the US homeland. Nuclear warfare, rather, is most likely to arise out of a local conventional conflict in the western Pacific or Eastern Europe, where the first exchange of nuclear blows would involve American forces deployed in those respective theaters. An unreliable Washington raises doubts among allies about whether the United States would actually use its forward-deployed forces at all.
Adversaries, too, might question whether an American president would run such grave risks in light of their growing capacity to threaten the US homeland with nuclear devastation. If using theater forces risks sparking a powder trail back to the United States, would an American president openly hostile to allied interests really turn to those shorter-range capabilities in the first place? Would the president risk bringing catastrophic damage upon the homeland for, say, the sake of Tokyo or Tallinn?
Nonnuclear allies across Eurasia are already weighing the prospect of American abandonment. In East Asia, Japan’s prime minister refused to reaffirm her country’s long-standing commitment not to acquire, produce, or even host nuclear weapons, and South Koreans have a growing interest in developing a nuclear capability. With an eye toward the expanding Chinese and North Korean theater arsenals, both Tokyo and Seoul fear there will come a day when the US nuclear umbrella no longer covers them.
They look at America’s comparatively bare theater capability in the western Pacific and wonder whether Washington would really respond to a regional nuclear attack with strategic forces. In Europe, allies like Poland, too, have expressed similar concerns. The gross disparity between Russia’s large and diverse theater nuclear force and America’s lean and inflexible counterpart has sown anxiety in capitals across the continent.
These worries are only reinforced by the Trump administration’s self-defeating gambit to wrest Greenland from Denmark. Earlier this month, just before Sweden airlifted troops into Nuuk as insurance against an American land grab, Stockholm’s leading newspaper shockingly called for a joint Nordic nuclear arsenal independent of the United States. Beyond the looming threat of Russia’s theater forces, America itself is undermining its security umbrella, which has long shielded the transatlantic community.
Squeezed between two great nuclear powers, Europe in the long run might decide that, despite its glaring limitations, it has no choice but to field an all-European deterrent. President Trump recently observed that deciding between absorbing Greenland or preserving NATO “may be a choice” he will have to make in the months ahead. With rhetoric like this, it is unsurprising that Britain and France—though armed only with small and inflexible nuclear forces that pale in comparison to Russia’s—appear to be in the initial stages of hedging against a post-American future. Some European commentators have even floated an idea once considered unthinkable in the post–World War II era: that a nuclear-armed Germany might reinforce global order rather than break it.
Read the full essay here. >>
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