Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and the Armageddon Agenda
by Michael
Klare and Tom
Engelhardt Posted
on September 16, 2024
Originally appeared at TomDispatch.
https://original.antiwar.com/Michael_Klare/2024/09/15/kamala-harris-donald-trump-and-the-armageddon-agenda/
The next president of the United States, whether
Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will face many contentious domestic issues that
have long divided this country, including abortion rights, immigration, racial
discord, and economic inequality. In the foreign policy realm, she or he will
face vexing decisions over Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, and China/Taiwan. But one
issue that few of us are even thinking about could pose a far greater quandary
for the next president and even deeper peril for the rest of us: nuclear weapons
policy.
Consider this: For the past three decades, we’ve been
living through a period in which the risk of nuclear war has been far lower
than at any time since the Nuclear Age began — so low, in fact, that the danger
of such a holocaust has been largely invisible to most people. The
collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of agreements that
substantially reduced the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles eliminated the
most extreme risk of thermonuclear conflict, allowing us to push thoughts of
nuclear Armageddon aside (and focus on other worries). But those quiescent days
should now be considered over. Relations among the major powers
have deteriorated in recent years and progress on
disarmament has stalled. The United States and Russia are, in fact,
upgrading their nuclear arsenals with new and more powerful weapons, while
China — previously an outlier in the nuclear threat equation — has begun a
major expansion of its own arsenal.
The altered nuclear equation is also evident in the
renewed talk of possible nuclear weapons use by leaders of the major
nuclear-armed powers. Such public discussion largely ceased after the Cuban
Missile Crisis of
1962, when it became evident that any thermonuclear exchange between the U.S.
and the Soviet Union would result in their mutual annihilation. However, that
fear has diminished in recent years and we’re again hearing talk of nuclear
weapons use. Since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir
Putin has repeatedly
threatened to
employ nuclear munitions in response to unspecified future actions of the U.S.
and NATO in support of Ukrainian forces. Citing those very threats, along with
China’s growing military might, Congress has authorized a program to develop
more “lower-yield” nuclear munitions supposedly meant (however madly) to
provide a president with further “options” in the event of a future regional
conflict with Russia or China.
Thanks to those and related developments, the world is
now closer to an actual nuclear conflagration than at any time since the end of
the Cold War. And while popular anxiety about a nuclear exchange may have
diminished, keep in mind that the explosive power of existing arsenals has not.
Imagine this, for instance: even a “limited” nuclear war — involving the use of
just a dozen or so of the hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBMs) possessed by China, Russia, and the United States — would cause enough
planetary destruction to ensure civilization’s collapse and the death of
billions of people.
And consider all of that as just the backdrop against
which the next president will undoubtedly face fateful decisions regarding the
production and possible use of such weaponry, whether in the bilateral nuclear
relationship between the U.S. and Russia or the trilateral one that
incorporates China.
The U.S.-Russia Nuclear Equation
The first nuclear quandary facing the next president
has an actual timeline. In approximately 500 days, on February 5, 2026, the New
Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining nuclear accord
between the U.S. and Russia limiting the size of their arsenals, will
expire. That treaty, signed in 2010, limits each side to a maximum of 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear
warheads along with 700 delivery systems, whether ICBMs, submarine-launched
ballistic missiles (SLBMs), or nuclear-capable heavy bombers. (That treaty only
covers strategic warheads, or those intended for attacks on each other’s
homeland; it does not include the potentially devastating stockpiles of
“tactical” nuclear munitions possessed by the two countries that are intended
for use in regional conflicts.)
At present, the treaty is on life support. On February
21, 2023, Vladimir Putin ominously announced that Russia had “suspended” its formal
participation in New START, although claiming it would continue to abide by its
warhead and delivery limits as long as the U.S. did so. The Biden
administration then agreed that it, too, would continue to abide by the treaty
limits. It
has also signaled to Moscow that it’s willing to discuss the
terms of a replacement treaty for New START when that agreement expires in
2026. The Russians have, however, declined to engage in such conversations as
long as the U.S. continues its military support for Ukraine.
Accordingly, among the first
major decisions the next president has to make in January 2025 will be what
stance to take regarding the future status of New START (or its replacement).
With the treaty’s extinction barely more than a year away, little time will
remain for careful deliberation as a new administration chooses among several
potentially fateful and contentious possibilities.
Its first option, of course,
would be to preserve the status quo, agreeing that the U.S. will abide by that
treaty’s numerical limits as long as Russia does, even in the absence of a
treaty obliging it to do so. Count on one thing, though: such a decision would
almost certainly be challenged and tested by nuclear hawks in both Washington
and Moscow.
Of course, President Harris or
Trump could decide to launch a diplomatic drive to persuade Moscow to agree to
a new version of New START, a distinctly demanding undertaking, given the time
remaining. Ideally, such an agreement would entail further reductions in the
U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals or at least include caps on the number of
tactical weapons on each side. And remember, even if such an agreement were
indeed to be reached, it would also require Senate approval and undoubtedly
encounter fierce resistance from the hawkish members of that body. Despite such
obstacles, this probably represents the best possible outcome imaginable.
The worst — and yet most
likely — would be a decision to abandon the New START limits and begin adding
yet more weapons to the American nuclear arsenal, reversing a bipartisan arms control policy that goes back to the
administration of President Richard Nixon. Sadly, there are too many members of
Congress who favor just such a shift and are already proposing measures to
initiate it.
In June, for example, in its
version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025, the
Senate Armed Services Committee instructed the Department of Defense to begin devising
plans for an increase in the number of deployed ICBMs from 400 of the existing
Minuteman-IIIs to 450 of its replacement, the future Sentinel ICBM. The House
Armed Services Committee version of that measure does not contain that
provision but includes separate plans for ICBM force expansion. (The
consolidated text of the bill has yet to be finalized.)
Should the U.S. and/or Russia
abandon the New START limits and begin adding to its atomic arsenal after
February 5, 2026, a new nuclear arms race would almost certainly be ignited,
with no foreseeable limits. No matter which side announced such a move first,
the other would undoubtedly feel compelled to follow suit and so, for the first
time since the Nixon era, both nuclear powers would be expanding rather than
reducing their deployed nuclear forces — only increasing, of course, the
potential for mutual annihilation. And if Cold War history is any guide, such
an arms-building contest would result in increased suspicion and hostility, adding a
greater danger of nuclear escalation to any crisis that might arise between
them.
The Three-Way Arms Race
Scary as that might prove, a
two-way nuclear arms race isn’t the greatest peril we face. After all, should
Moscow and Washington prove unable to agree on a successor to New START and
begin expanding their arsenals, any trilateral nuclear
agreement including China that might slow that country’s present nuclear
buildup becomes essentially unimaginable.
Ever since it acquired nuclear
weapons in 1964, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursued a minimalist stance when it came to deploying such
weaponry, insisting that it would never initiate a nuclear conflict but would
only use nuclear weapons in a second-strike retaliatory fashion following a
nuclear attack on the PRC. In accordance with that policy, China long
maintained a relatively small arsenal, only 200 or so nuclear warheads and a
small fleet of ICBMs and SLBMs. In the past few years, however, China has
launched a significant nuclear build-up, adding another 300 warheads and producing more
missiles and missile-launching silos — all while insisting its no-first-use
policy remains unchanged and that it is only maintaining a retaliatory force to
deter potential aggression by other nuclear-armed states.
Some Western analysts believe
that Xi Jinping, China’s nationalistic and authoritarian leader, considers a larger arsenal necessary to boost his
country’s status in a highly competitive, multipolar world. Others argue that
China fears improvements in U.S. defensive capabilities,
especially the installation of anti-ballistic missile systems, that could
endanger its relatively small retaliatory force and so rob it of a deterrent to
any future American first strike.
Given the Chinese construction
of several hundred new missile silos, Pentagon analysts contend that the country plans to deploy as many as
1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035 — roughly equivalent to
deployed Russian and American stockpiles under the New START guidelines. At
present, there is no way to confirm such predictions, which are based on
extrapolations from the recent growth of the Chinese arsenal from perhaps 200
to 500 warheads. Nonetheless, many Washington officials, especially in the
Republican Party, have begun to argue that, given such a buildup, the New START
limits must be abandoned in 2026 and yet more weapons added to the deployed
U.S. nuclear stockpile to counter both Russia and China.
As Franklin Miller of the
Washington-based Scowcroft Group and a former director of nuclear targeting in
the office of the secretary of defense put it, “Deterring China and Russia simultaneously
[requires] an increased level of U.S. strategic warheads.” Miller was one of 12
members of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United
States, a bipartisan group convened in
2022 to reconsider America’s nuclear policies in light of China’s growing
arsenal, Putin’s nuclear threats, and other developments. In its final October
2023 report, that commission recommended numerous alterations and additions to the
American arsenal, including installing multiple warheads (instead of single
ones) on the Sentinel missiles being built to replace the Minuteman ICBM and
increasing the number of B-21 nuclear bombers and Columbia-class
ballistic-missile submarines to be produced under the Pentagon’s $1.5
trillion nuclear “modernization” program.
The Biden administration has
yet to endorse the recommendations in that report. It has, however, signaled
that it’s considering the steps a future administration might take to address
an expanded Chinese arsenal. In March, the White House approved a new version of a top-secret document, the
Nuclear Employment Guidance, which for the first time reportedly focused as
much on countering China as Russia. According to the few public comments made
by administration officials about that document, it, too, sets out contingency
plans for increasing the number of deployed strategic weapons in the years
ahead if Russia breaks out of the current New START limits and no arms
restraints have been negotiated with China.
“We have begun exploring
options to increase future launcher capacity or additional deployed warheads on
the land, sea, and air legs [of the nuclear delivery “triad” of ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers] that could offer
national leadership increased flexibility, if desired, and executed,” said acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Policy
Vipin Narang on August 1st. While none of those options are likely to be
implemented in President Biden’s remaining months, the next administration will
be confronted with distinctly ominous decisions about the future composition of
that already monstrous nuclear arsenal.
Whether it is kept as is or
expanded, the one option you won’t hear much about in Washington is finding
ways to reduce it. And count on one thing: even a decision simply to preserve
the status quo in the context of today’s increasingly antagonistic international
environment poses an increased risk of nuclear conflict. Any decision to expand
it, along with comparable moves by Russia and China, will undoubtedly create an
even greater risk of instability and potentially suicidal nuclear escalation.
The Need for Citizen Advocacy
For all too many of us,
nuclear weapons policy seems like a difficult issue that should be left to the
experts. This wasn’t always so. During the Cold War years, nuclear war seemed
like an ever-present possibility and millions of Americans familiarized themselves
with nuclear issues, participating in ban-the-bomb protests or the Nuclear
Weapons Freeze Campaign of the 1980s. But with the Cold War’s end and a
diminished sense of nuclear doom, most of us turned to other issues and
concerns. Yet the nuclear danger is growing rapidly and so decisions regarding
the U.S. arsenal could have life-or-death repercussions on a global scale.
And one thing should be made clear: adding more
weaponry to the U.S. arsenal will not make us one bit safer. Given the
invulnerability of this country’s missile-bearing nuclear submarines and the
multitude of other weapons in our nuclear arsenal, no foreign leader could
conceivably mount a first strike on this country and not expect catastrophic
retaliation, which in turn would devastate the planet. Acquiring more nuclear
weapons would not alter any of this in the slightest. All it could possibly do
is add to international tensions and increase the risk of global annihilation.
As Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms
Control Association, a nonpartisan research and advocacy outfit, put it
recently: “Significant
increases in the U.S. deployed nuclear arsenal would undermine mutual and
global security by making the existing balance of nuclear terror more
unpredictable and would set into motion a counterproductive, costly
action-reaction cycle of nuclear competition.”
A decision to pursue such a reckless path could occur
just months from now. In early 2025, the next president, whether Kamala Harris
or Donald Trump, will be making critical decisions regarding the future of the
New START Treaty and the composition of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Given the
vital stakes involved, such decisions should not be left to the president and a
small coterie of her or his close advisers. Rather, it should be the concern of
every citizen, ensuring vigorous debate on alternative options, including steps
aimed at reducing and eventually eliminating the world’s nuclear arsenals.
Without such public advocacy, we face the very real danger that, for the first
time since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945,
nuclear weapons will again be detonated on this planet, with billions of us
finding ourselves in almost
unimaginable peril.
