China’s objective has always been strategic stability, so 20 warheads each for Russia and the US pretty much guaranteed that China could take out at least one city.

The Cold War US and the Soviets more or less believed in nuclear primacy (for the other guy at least) and so details of each sides’ strategic posture mattered greatly if some advantage could be imagined.

We do not structure our nuclear force by calculating numbers on the back of an envelope. We have a deployed force of ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers. Right now we have ICBMs at 3 bases, with 3 squadrons per base, and we have Trident submarines at 2 bases, one in the Pacific and one in the Atlantic. If you start reducing delivery vehicles, you have to do it with the basing and operations in mind. If you go down to 300 ICBMs, at 2 bases, you begin to have manning, command and career path problems that are even worse (and more costly) than those you have at 3 bases. You may quickly decide that 2 bases are not cost effective, its 3 or nothing. For Tridents, there are a minimum number of boats that you need at each base to maintain current operational patterns (with 2 subs on station in each ocean, you need 5-7 at the base to support the rotation.) If you go down to 7 subs, you either have to alter the operating patterns, keeping fewer boats at sea, or you to go to one base (which you would probably do because 2 bases for only 7 boats is just too expensive.) If you go to one base, that will probably be the Pacific, because that’s where more of the threats come from these days, but pulling out of the Atlantic has target coverage implications, and some considerations for our support of NATO.

These are the kinds of things that the military thinks about. It does not volunteer to alter its current deployment and operating patterns, but will find a way to do so if changes in policy allow for changes in deployments.

These considerations are true whether you are shooting first, or second, and they do presume you want to retain some ability to respond promptly or to ensure survivability of Tridents. Otherwise, you could leave them sitting in port.

We do not size or structure our force with the intent of destroying some percentage of a nations’ population. We never have.

The big policy changes which would allow us to go lower would be 1) Second strike only and 2) Use Macnamara’s 25% killed criteria for adequate retaliation (50 warheads for Russia, 100 for China)

That would allow us to easily cut the deployed arsenal in half for a start—7 Tridents and 300 ICBMs would give us three separate retaliatory strike forces in the 30-100 warhead range. Further cuts wouldn’t be that hard, if you have an agreement with Russia and China. (Fewer Russian warheads means you need fewer ICBMs to have a decent second-strike ICBM force)

But how would “(i.e. pull Tridents out of the Atlantic, or slow their operating tempo and keep them closer to ports, or abandon NATO)” allow us to reduce numbers? I’m curious as to why those three were your examples.

In Prague Obama made it clear where he falls on the spectrum of options. He is the big cheese, however he is not the one to sign the NPR or the QDR- the man to do that has some clearly alternate views about the future of US nuclear weapons. I wouldn’t expect the NPR to repeat the Prague speech, but rather to demonstrate the balance between the two men who lead/decide US nuclear weapons policy.

This doesn’t necessarily mean it will be a “vanilla” report. I completely agree with Jeffrey: give the President a set of options, and evaluate the risks and potential benefits of each. Therein lies the balance: Gates’ recommendations informaing Obama’s decisions.

In Prague, President Obama clearly defined our long term nuclear policy objective – to improve our national security by carefully and gradually moving toward the global elimination of all nuclear weapons. This global objective has also been endorsed by other P5 leaders. Committees and commissions should now be meeting to develop the detailed strategy to best achieve this objective, not how to redefine the goal. Goal, plan, execute – in that order.

“Exactly these questions of “how much is enough” were raised fifty years ago in secret debate within the U.S. government, when Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke argued that a small force of mainly nuclear missile-launching Polaris submarines was enough for deterrence. Burke and Navy leaders developed a concept of “finite” or “minimum” deterrence—highly relevant to today’s debate—that they believed would make the United States safer because it would dissuade nuclear attacks while removing pressures for a dangerous “hair-trigger” posture.

In early 1960, when Eisenhower’s budget director Maurice Stans was told that the U.S. Navy’s Polaris missile-launching submarines could “destroy 232 targets, which was sufficient to destroy all of Russia,” he asked defense officials, “If POLARIS could do this job, why did we need other … ICBMs, SAC aircraft, and overseas bases?” According to Stans, the answer “he had received … [was] that was someone else’s problem.” An electronic briefing book of declassified documents obtained through archival research and published for the first time by the National Security Archive shows how the U.S. Navy, tried to take responsibility for this “problem” by supporting a minimum deterrent force that would threaten a “finite” list of major urban-industrial and command centers in the heart of the Soviet Union.

“With their capability to destroy key Soviet targets, Burke believed, the virtually undetectable and invulnerable Polaris submarines could “inflict terrible punishment” and deter Moscow from launching a surprise attack on the United States or its allies. By contrast, Burke saw land-based missile and bombers as vulnerable to attack, which made the U.S.-Soviet nuclear relationship dangerously unstable. While he did not propose eliminating all strategic bombers and ICBMs, he believed that a force of about 40 Polaris submarines (16 missiles each) was a reasonable answer to the question “how much is enough?”

And that was during the Cold War.

Far fewer would now be needed.

Its interesting to note that, in the past few years, after the WSJ editorial and before the SPC, the debate over the future of U.S. nuclear weapons policy was mostly between the center (CSIS report, CFR report) and the left (FAS report); the right had not only walked off the stage in the latter years of the Bush Administration, it had lost its seat in the audience in many of the newly revived discussions. So, between the center and the left, you had general agreement on issues like the value of arms control with Russia (even CTBT won support, either as a critical component or as “a bad idea whose time had come”), the value of further reductions (the center thought they should be marginal and modest; the left thought they should be deep), and the value of the “vision of a world free of nuclear weapons” (the center thought it provided some nice near-term goals, further left saw it as a valued goal in and of itself). Anyway, the range of debate had narrowed. Then came the SPC. It not only brought the right back into the debate, it gave them the front and center of the stage because the right-leaning commissioners had far greater depth of experience in nuclear weapons policy than most of the left-leaning commissioners (who were more generalists). So the report seems to have driven to the right of the debate we have all participated in over the past few years.

Its quite possible that the NPR will move back to the center. It will probably acknowledge the goals of the left side of the debate, but it will not implement the deep reductions or force structure changes favored by the left. It will take the operational expertise of the military and feed it into marginal, modest changes in force levels. It will also come with some real changes in the arms control agenda, and possibly some changes in rhetoric and declaratory policy, too. Its easy to argue that this will be better than the rhetoric, policies, and programs of the Bush years, even though its not going to be everything that those on the left of the debate had wanted.

To be honest, some of the more striking changes in force structure and weapons numbers can come only after some pretty striking changes in policy. And policy choices must come from the top. One can hope that the NPR offers options — this is what we can do now, with few changes in policy, but, if you change policy (i.e. pull Tridents out of the Atlantic, or slow their operating tempo and keep them closer to ports, or abandon NATO), then this is where you can go.

I was really pleased to see Congress take an interest, when it created the SPC and the NPR, but I now think it may have been a mistake to have the SPC, when the right got to run the show, and it may have been better to just let all the private NGO products set the stage for the NPR.

Jervis put it nicely in his Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution that in the absence nuclear war many arguments about nuclear posture and strategy simply cannot be verified and remain hypothetical and based on certain sets of logic rather than evidence. It is difficult to imagine DoD/DoE presenting a smorgasbord options to the White House based on different sets of logic when the mental map of the nuclear policy community remains committed to one based on the status quo. If you could taste the logic it would be vanilla.

who are the people on it?