Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
5/15/2015
The United States should seek to improve ts arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons to hedge against actors who might seek to offset this country’s conventional superiority, a former U.S. senior defense official said this week. “I think that we have to address qualitative inferiority that the United States has in what we used to call tactical nuclear weapons,” Clark Murdock, currently Senior Adviser of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said during an event in Washington. “It’s never a term I’m very fond of, and I wasn’t fond of it in the Cold War either, because any use of a nuclear weapon’s going to have strategic implications.”
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) estimates that the United States maintains about 500 tactical nuclear warheads—all of them B61 gravity bombs—which can be delivered by fighters and bombers. FAS also estimates that Russia maintains about 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads, deliverable through surface-to-air, anti-ballistic missile, coastal defense, bomber, fighter, short-range ballistic missile, ground-launched cruise missile, submarine and surface ship platforms.
Will AF Deploy F-35s as Tactical Nukes?
Murdock’s remarks come about a month before he and a variety of nuclear think tank experts are expected to release a study exploring U.S. nuclear strategy from 2025 to 2050. He also called this week for the Air Force to forward-deploy F-35s as tactical nuclear weapons, with the strategic Long-Range Strike Bomber backing up the other two legs of the triad. Bombers are the most flexible leg, Murdock said. “It’s the one you can signal with. It’s the one you can send to support F-35s as you go forward. It’s one where if you have no F-35s, you could still use it, and it’s relatively cheap because the Air Force is buying bombers for conventional missions.”
Are ICBMs a Hedge?
Along with improving the tactical force, Murdock said continuing a triad would allow the United States flexible nuclear response options, with intercontinental ballistic missiles hedging submarine-launched ballistic missiles. “In this era of transparency, I can’t help but be concerned by how few aim points are involved in our submarine-based deterrent,” he said. The Navy has said it is building 16 missile tubes into each Ohio-class Replacement submarine, scheduled for debut in 2031. “How can we bet that in an age of high-performance computing with almost ubiquitous sensors, that there are not going to be alarm bells going off that say, ‘Whoops, there are all the targets,’ at one time, all the targets? I just don’t see how that won’t happen,” Murdock said.
Murdock said the deterrence layer that ICBMs provide could help offset nuclear attacks from other nations or rogue actors. “The whole thing about ICBMs is you have a sufficient number of targets that it’s raised the barrier very high to any kind of pre-emptive attack,” he said.
