The more things change, the more they stay the same. There is a new arms race in the Indo-Pacific, including a nuclear arms race, and American academics — including Matthew Bunn of Harvard’s Kennedy School — call upon the United States to unilaterally disarm. Bunn, writing in the National Interest, invokes President John F. Kennedy’s speech at American University where, Bunn writes, “Kennedy made the case that the horrors of a potential nuclear holocaust made it urgent to find a path to peace and that doing so required both sides of the Cold War to change.”
But Bunn recommends unilateral moves by the United States to “reduce tensions,” such as the Biden administration’s pledge to refrain from conducting direct-ascent antisatellite (ASAT) weapon tests, which Bunn praises but says is not enough. Bunn also urges Biden to announce that some of our nuclear missiles will be taken off alert, commit that we will not use nuclear missiles first “unless the very survival of our country or one of our treaty allies was at stake,” pledge to never deploy nuclear missiles where they can reach Beijing or Moscow in “just a few minutes,” offer to allow China and Russia to monitor our “weapons-maintenance experiments” to ensure we are complying with a nuclear test ban, and allow “international inspection” of our “nuclear enrichment and plutonium processing activities” to ensure that we are not using them for nuclear weapons. Those steps, Bunn hopes, will lead to new arms control treaties. What Angelo Codevilla called the “arms control delusion” lives on in the faculty rooms of Harvard. (READ MORE: America’s Allies Should Consider Going Nuclear)
We have been here before. In the 1960s and 70s, in the face of a massive Soviet nuclear buildup, we stopped building under the influence of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s theory of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD). McNamara — perhaps our worst secretary of defense — believed that nuclear superiority was meaningless and that as long as the U.S. had enough survival nuclear weapons after a Soviet first strike, the Soviets would be deterred from launching such a strike because they understood the result would be mutual suicide. MAD was the perfect arms control concept because once we had enough missiles and warheads to destroy all Soviet cities, we didn’t need to build more even if the Soviets continued to build more, which they did. MAD ignored the fact that Soviet warheads were targeted at our missiles and our submarine and bomber bases — theoretically holding at risk much of our nuclear triad. Our adherence to MAD and arms control in the 1970s resulted in the emergence of a Soviet first-strike capability (each Soviet monster SS-18 missile was capable of launching up to 10 independently targeted warheads with sufficient accuracy to destroy much of our ground-based missile silos, submarines, and bomber bases), which, if successful, would leave the U.S. president with the choice of surrender or suicide.
During hearings on the proposed SALT II Treaty (which was never ratified), Richard Pipes, who would later serve on President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff, testified that the Soviets “never adopted our doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction.” Instead, Pipes stated, Soviet leaders consistently strove “to attain overwhelming strategic superiority” as part of what he labeled their “war-winning strategy.” At that same hearing, Henry Kissinger, who had negotiated the SALT I Treaty during the Nixon administration, testified that the strategic military balance between the United States and the Soviet Union began to shift in the 1960s. He described the growth of Soviet strategic nuclear forces since then as “inexorable” and noted that “instead of stopping when they reached parity with us, as the Johnson administration expected, the Soviets continued their missile buildup.” Kissinger explained the then emerging Soviet first-strike capability and noted, ominously, that “rarely in history has a nation [the U.S.] so passively accepted such a radical change in the military balance.” Kissinger stated that this situation resulted from “unilateral decisions” made by the United States under the influence of MAD.
Even President Jimmy Carter’s defense secretary, Harold Brown, later admitted that our unilateral restraint failed to persuade the Soviets to do likewise. “[W]hen we build,” Brown remarked, “they build; when we cut, they build.”
As China continues what top U.S. military leaders call a nuclear weapons “strategic breakout,” as the Russians continue to modernize their nuclear forces, and as nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran grow, calls for unilateral U.S. restraint are wrongheaded and dangerous. President Kennedy’s “hotline” and Limited Test Ban Treaty were not unilateral moves. The U.S. nuclear arms buildup continued under Kennedy. The United States exercised unilateral nuclear restraint later under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and still later during the first years of the Carter administration. Unilateral restraint didn’t work then with the Soviets, and it won’t work now with China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. Kennedy’s speech aside, that is the real lesson of the 1960s and 1970s.
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