May 12, 2015

Nuclear Expert Calls for U.S. to Revamp Its Tactical Nukes

By ExchangeMonitor

A nuclear expert and former senior U.S. defense official yesterday said the U.S. should improve its arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons to hedge against actors who might seek to offset this country’s conventional superiority. “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, told attendees of the Peter Huessy Breakfast 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 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. FAS estimates that the U.S. maintains about 500 tactical nuclear warheads—all of them B61 gravity bombs—which can be delivered by fighters and bombers.

Murdock’s remarks come about a month before he said he and a variety of nuclear think tank experts will release a study exploring U.S. nuclear strategy from 2025 to 2050. Along with improving the tactical force, Murdock said continuing a triad would allow the U.S. flexible nuclear response options, with intercontinental ballistic missiles backing up 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. Moreover, the ICBM deterrence layer could help offset nuclear attacks from other nations or rogue actors, he said. “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," Murdock said. Murdock’s experience includes working in the Office of the Air Force Chief of Staff, the Defense Department and the CIA.

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