The very real threat of nuclear war hasn’t been on the radar since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Yet the capacity for self-annihilation remains. Consider the question raised by Daniel Ellsberg:
“When I say that there is a step that could reduce the risk of nuclear war significantly that has not been taken but could easily be taken, and that that is the elimination of American ICBMs, I’m referring to the fact that there is only one weapon in our arsenal that confronts a president with the urgent decision of whether to launch nuclear war and that is the decision to launch our ICBMs.”
He went on to stress that ICBMs are uniquely dangerous because they’re vulnerable to being destroyed in an attack (“use them or lose them”). In contrast, nuclear weapons on submarines and planes are not vulnerable and
“can be called back — in fact they don’t even have to be called back, they can… circle until they get a positive order to go ahead… That’s not true for ICBMs. They are fixed location, known to the Russians… Should we have mutual elimination of ICBMs? Of course. But we don’t need to wait for Russia to wake up to this reasoning… to do what we can to reduce the risk of nuclear war.”
And he concluded: “To remove ours is to eliminate not only the chance that we will use our ICBMs wrongly, but it also deprives the Russians of the fear that our ICBMs are on the way toward them.”
It would be a great step toward securing the world from a nuclear extinction level event, but the geopolitics of the situation make the move a contested one at best.
If the death of everyone can still be maintained with bombers and submarines do we really need the extra death (and extra threat) of ICBM’s? Is it even rational to consider the move as it might embolden the Russians and Chinese with even the perceived move away from MAD?
It is a calculus that makes sense in terms of lowering the threat to the entire world, but are the corresponding consequences (real or perceived) worth the risk, as it would have to be the US that would stand down first.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
5 comments
January 8, 2024 at 7:42 am
Infidel753
Interesting idea. It would preserve the nuclear deterrent, which is needed to prevent small-scale provocations from blowing up into World-War-II-size disasters, but reduces the risk of a nuclear war being triggered by mistake. There’s not much risk of China and Russia being emboldened. They would know we still have submarine-based missiles, which are now as accurate as land-based ones and could be used to destroy enemy missiles, not just cities. I think Israel and the UK have only submarine-based nuclear weapons, so they evidently consider that enough to maintain deterrence.
(It seems questionable how effective delivery by bombers would be, since the Ukraine war has shown that anti-aircraft defenses are becoming much more effective than in the past, but no doubt the military is well aware of that issue.)
The biggest problem would probably be political. Putin is very unlikely to give up land-based missiles (though Xi, or a more rational future Russian leader, might do so with the right incentives), so it would have to be a unilateral US decision. If a Democratic president made such a move, the Republicans would scream treason from the rooftops; and if a Republican president did it, the know-nothing base would turn against him almost as fiercely.
Still, this kind of outside-the-box thinking is what we need. If later on the US political environment becomes less polarized and less hysterical, it could well make the world safer.
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January 9, 2024 at 2:30 pm
Widdershins
For all the grown-up reasons why this won’t happen, the most basic reason is that it’s a juvenile you-know-what measuring competition, so yeah, no-one’s going to stop first.
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January 9, 2024 at 5:19 pm
Infidel753
Nuclear arms-reduction treaties have succeeded in the past. At the height of the Cold War the US and USSR had about thirty thousand nuclear bombs each, which over time was reduced to about five thousand each today. These did not involve removing an entire category of delivery system, but they cut the number substantially.
The problem today is the much greater polarization and hostility in US internal politics, and Putin’s much greater paranoia and aggressiveness compared with Soviet/Russian rulers from the détente era through Yeltsin.
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January 21, 2024 at 1:36 pm
The Arbourist
@infidel753
It is going to take awhile for the world to reset and find a more stable equilibrium. I hope that we can open talks between the superpowers to help lessen the tension on the respective nuclear triggers.
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January 21, 2024 at 1:37 pm
The Arbourist
@infidel753
It’s hard to rationalize the irrational, but I would think we could come to agreement on how many times over we could annihilate each other and then find a slightly smaller number to work toward. :/
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