NEW CARNEGIE REPORT SUGGESTS SHIFT IN U.S. NUCLEAR DECLARATORY POLICY

In an effort to shift debate on nuclear policy away from stockpile sizes and reductions with Russia, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is suggesting that the United States instead focus on a different sort of reduction: to the circumstances that could lead the U.S. to use nuclear weapons. A new report authored by Carnegie Nuclear Policy Program Director George Perkovich, “Do Unto Others: Toward a Defensible Nuclear Doctrine,” urges the Obama Administration to slightly alter its nuclear declaratory policy, shifting to a policy would lead the U.S. to use nuclear weapons only in cases where there are “threats to survival.” The current threshold for nuclear weapons use outlined in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review is “extreme circumstances,” which could leave open the possibility of a first strike aimed at Russia or China. The new approach, however, would still provide an adequate deterrent against threats to the survival of the U.S. and its allies and minimize the likelihood of any nuclear use or escalation while reducing the motivation for other countries to pursue or expand nuclear arsenals and “enhance credibility of the deterrence policy by making it a model that the United States would recognize as morally and legally defensible if other nuclear-armed states copied it.” In the report, Perkovich suggests that the new approach is “less quixotic than concentrating only on reducing the number of nuclear weapons to zero or, alternatively, believing that first-use nuclear deterrence will prevent the spread and use of these weapons forever.”

Perkovich concedes, however, that such an approach could pave the way for more nuclear reductions. “The declaratory policy and subsidiary targeting concept and implementation guidelines proposed here would require significantly fewer nuclear weapons than Washington will deploy when the New START Treaty is implemented fully,” the report says. “In principle—and recognizing that in practice the United States would only reduce in parallel with Russia—a force closer in numbers and doctrinal governance to that of China today should be sufficient.” Perkovich acknowledges that such a drastic reduction—China is believed to have in the range of approximately 400 warheads in its arsenal—could only occur if China backs off any expansion plans for its nuclear arsenal and if U.S. allies like South Korea, Japan, and others could be convinced that such a move would not weaken the U.S. nuclear umbrella.