As a strategy, MAD was considered but jettisoned by the United States 65 years ago. For example, President John F. Kennedy noted, “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death-wish for the world.” Kennedy succeeded in adopting a strategy short of all-out retaliation that came to be known as “flexible response,” which, in 1974, was fully developed by James Schlesinger and eventually codified in Presidential Defense Directive 59.

Whether the United States has 10,000 or 1,500 strategic nuclear weapons, American forces were designed to have a secure retaliatory capability at any level of conflict. The objective was to end any conflict as soon as possible and at the lowest level of destruction. The American objective was not to burn an adversary’s cities to the ground. American deterrence strategy was to hold at risk what the adversary valued most.

Critics of current deterrence strategy assume that no nuclear-armed adversary of the United States believes in “fighting” a nuclear war. So, the US should drop its long-held deterrence strategy and go back to MAD or something like it. At the same time, many of these critics join nuclear abolitionists to support nuclear weapons but only to deter, not engage, in warfighting. If conflict breaks out and these weapons will not be used in retaliation, then nuclear forces are off the table and reduced to a bluff.

The mistaken notion that the US has a MAD strategy plays into the hands of Russia and China. These two nations both seek to escalate or threaten to escalate in a crisis or conflict with the limited use of nuclear weapons. The objective is to get the United States to stand down and not come to the defense of her allies, a restraint to give Russia and China a strategic advantage.

Unfortunately, much of the current commentary on nuclear threats still assumes the US and its adversaries maintain a mutually assured destruction strategy as the best means to avoid any use of nuclear weapons. Annie Jacobson’s recent book, On Nuclear War: A Scenario, describes a mutually assured destruction strategy, which she assumes the US maintains, as simply MAD or crazy. She posits that any initial use of nuclear weapons would almost automatically result in the all-out use of such weapons, leading to nuclear winter and killing billions. As such, she calls for the entirety of American nuclear deterrence to be jettisoned.

Being in the deterrence business, it is important for Congress, the media, the executive decisionmakers in the military and Department of Defense to fully understand what deterrence, as practiced by the United States, entails and why it must be sustained.

To explain this requires a review of history and an understanding that adversaries of the United States and the West sought military advantage through enhanced nuclear weapons technology. Over time the challenge for the US to sustain deterrence changed. The Soviets sought to put nuclear weapons in space, then built a huge first-strike missile force, then deployed thousands of medium-range SS-20s to intimidate and split NATO, and, most recently, built a theater-strike capability to keep the United States and NATO from winning the war in Ukraine.

The US nuclear deterrent was never one size fits all and automatically fit for purpose. For example, the US and NATO faced a huge conventional military threat from the Soviet Union from the beginning of the Cold War on the plains of central Europe, a place called the Fulda Gap. The Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks were not matched by American conventional forces. President Dwight D. Eisenhower did not wish to bankrupt the US treasury by building such a large and costly conventional military. The available alternative was to establish a nuclear umbrella over Europe, primarily aimed at Soviet tank armies. Thus, in the initial Cold War period, the US assumed a nuclear conflict would most probably grow out of an initial conventional war.

As technology improved, however, a threat emerged that could markedly change the correlation of forces between the United States and the USSR. The US still sought to deter a potential Soviet push into central Europe, but an additional threat was a potential Soviet pre-emptive first strike seeking to eliminate much of the American extended deterrent, followed up by a subsequent conventional invasion of Europe.

In 1963, the American strategic nuclear deterrent consisted of 6,000 nuclear warheads while the Russians had 600 warheads. As President Kennedy remarked, this strength, and particularly the newly deployed Minuteman missiles, were “my ace in the hole” that gave the United States the strategic advantage that peacefully ended the Cuban Missile Crisis.

However, by the time the next decade ended, the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) “arms control” treaty process was implemented and the USSR largely caught up, deploying 7,800 warheads compared to the US force of 8,700 warheads. Most worrisome was the new Soviet land-based missile force of 3,000 warheads on highly accurate SS-18s—with the overall Soviet nuclear force projected to grow to over 24,000 warheads by 1993.

As Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird told Congress in 1974, “the Soviets are going for a first strike force and there is no doubt about it.” The SS-18 eventually held at risk the entirety of the US land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force. This was the only American deterrent force that was sufficiently accurate to target key Soviet leadership and military targets without requiring “city busting.”

The US stopped deploying land-based missiles at 1,050 and associated warheads at around 2,000—assuming the USSR would show equal restraint. But Moscow built a huge land-based ICBM force that could take out the nation’s Minuteman missiles, leaving the US without the ability to hold key Soviet assets at risk. This perceived imbalance was known as the “window of vulnerability” where the US faced the prospects of a Soviet-initiated first strike that would leave US leaders exactly where President Kennedy worried it would.

The US solved the strategic equation of the window of vulnerability, the Soviet empire collapsed, the US added the Trident II D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile and Peacekeeper land-based ICBM, Soviet SS-20s were banned, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) arms control process brought Russian warheads down to under 2,000.

In April 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, economically unable to rebuild a Soviet-era nuclear force, decreed that Moscow develop highly accurate, small, low-yield, battlefield nuclear weapons, which his successor, Vladimir Putin, did in earnest. As former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Hyten warned, these theater nuclear weapons were designed to “escalate to win” a conventional conflict or crisis between Moscow and Washington.

Putin thinks the US will not respond to the small-scale use of nuclear weapons because the US will not want to risk escalation and the possibility of strategic nuclear exchange. That is why Putin made exactly these threats over NATO’s intervention in the war against Ukraine.

Both Russia and China assume the relative weak theater nuclear forces the US maintains are now insufficient to match escalatory threats from Moscow and possibly Beijing. This point was emphasized by the 2023 Strategic Posture Commission report in laying out the opening of a new window of vulnerability.

The US is indeed now developing a greater theater nuclear deterrent to close the technology gap. However, simply adding to America’s conventional deterrent is not sufficient. As military leadership has repeatedly emphasized, if adversarial nuclear forces are introduced into a conventional conflict, the American advantage ceases. In short, conventional military leverage disappears.

The central tenets of mutually assured destruction no longer apply. MAD was jettisoned long ago. More importantly, America’s adversaries employ credible threats with the nuclear forces. New technology and expanding adversary arsenals are undermining the limited deterrent value of the American nuclear arsenal, a fact that must change if the United States seeks to ensure it does not find itself embroiled in a conflict where capitulation or Armageddon are the nation’s only options.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies.

Mutually Assured Destruction was originally published on Global Security Review.

In both cases, the situation is dire for Ukraine and one that will require considerable external assistance. Such assistance is crucial to maintain the credibility of the West, yet the fear is that once the war ends, so, too, will Western interest—leaving Ukraine with an aging population and a destroyed economy that may not recover for decades. If that happens, the demographic decline of the state will only accelerate as it will provide few opportunities for its younger population who will leave. The West needs, therefore, to come up with a long-term plan to reverse both these interrelated trends.

Demographic Decline

Ukraine’s population is declining and has for some time. The country went from a population of 51.7 million, at the time of independence in 1991, to 43.5 million in 2020. A weak economy with few jobs led to an exodus of young people to other parts of the world, particularly Western Europe. Declining birth rates also contributed to a shrinking of the population with it reaching a fertility rate of 1.23 children per couple by 2019. Ukraine is one of the European countries that was already in serious demographic decline and the war has only exacerbated this trend. By 2023 the population shrank to 34.8 million.

The war led to 4–6 million citizens living in an area occupied by Russia, another 4 million are refugees in the European Union (EU), and another 1 million are spread over the rest of the world. Worse, about 20 percent of Ukraine’s children are now refugees in the EU and there is a big question mark over how many of these children and their parents will return to the war-torn and impoverished nation. Thus, a Ukrainian population that was meant to reach 35 million by 2050 is now expected to further shrink by that year to 30.9 million. As the Census Bureau’s data shows the bulk of this population will be in the age group 55–75, hardly a cohort that can drive economic activity in the country, foster innovation, or attract outside investment.

The Cost of Economic Reconstruction

The economic damage to Ukraine, especially the destruction of its infrastructure, continues to grow, leading the World Bank, in 2023, to estimate that the country would require $411 billion for rebuilding from the war’s devastation. This estimate now tops $486 billion, although the final figure is unclear—given recent attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. By the time the war is over the cost of reconstruction is likely to exceed $500 billion, a staggering amount for any group of countries to provide in assistance. To put this in perspective, the EU is committing $54 billion over a four-year period to Ukraine—a sum of $13.5 billion a year. Funding at that level is too little to significantly change the fortunes of Ukraine, especially since after the war is over the EU and US may have other priorities. This means upping aid to the level where it has a meaningful effect on Ukraine’s reconstruction efforts and that leads to the other problem.

The EU and US would have to sink roughly $20 billion a year for 25 years into the country. Asking for such a long-term commitment is difficult. Western nations would likely balk at the sums involved and the length of the financial commitment to Kyiv. Further, western public opinion, while overwhelmingly supportive of Ukraine, is likely to lose interest in the minutiae of post-war reconstruction. Supplying arms, after all, is far more compelling and appealing than seeking to rebuild power grids and schools.

One solution is to take the $300 billion of confiscated Russian assets and either transfer them to Ukraine or loan them to Kyiv. The problem with this approach is that it reduces confidence in western financial institutions as secure and safe repositories of foreign assets.  Taking such an action might see foreign investors pull their holdings in the West. Funding Ukrainian reconstruction may, therefore, be costly for the West. But both for demographic reasons and for showing the strength of Western commitment, it is necessary to consider a sizeable and long-term economic package for Ukraine.

Demographically, a Ukraine that shows the prospect of being rapidly rebuilt is far more likely to attract back the millions of refugees who have crossed into other countries. It will also stem the outflow of future populations from the country as jobs and opportunities become freely available. Beginning with the Ukrainian arms industry, particularly its missile and aircraft industries, may be a good starting place. At one point, Ukraine-based Antonov was one of two producers of heavy-lift aircraft for the Soviet Union. Antonov manufactured the world’s largest transport aircraft—the An-225 Mriya. The sole operational Mriya was destroyed in the early days of the attack on Kyiv, but the manufacturing rights and technical data were sold to China in 2016. Rebuilding what Ukraine has a proven talent and capacity for would be the first right step in the path to reconstruction.

A long-term commitment would also show the rest of the world that the West is willing to bear the burden of a decades-long aid process. In doing so, it would signal that the Western alliance does not cut and run when its short-term objectives are achieved. After Afghanistan, for example, trust in the West as a reliable long-term ally reached a low given the manner of the pull-out from Kabul. A sustained commitment to Kyiv would show that the sacrifices made by the Ukrainian people were not in vain.

While the war may continue for a while, it is necessary to develop a solid long-term plan for the economic reconstruction of Ukraine and to line up donors who will fund it over a long period of time. Otherwise, Ukraine’s demographic disaster will only escalate, and the West will be seen as an alliance that does not honor its commitments.

Amit Gupta is a Senior Fellow of the National Institute of Deterrence Studies. The views in this article are his and do not necessarily reflect those of the NIDS. He can be contacted at agupta1856@gmail.com.

Ukraine’s Long-Term Catastrophes: Demographic Decline and Economic Devastation was originally published on Global Security Review.

By Lt Col Shawn Littleton

Wild Blue Yonder, By Lt Col Shawn Littleton

With the movie Oppenheimer bringing the Bomb back into our casual conversations, it is a good time to rethink how you feel about the Bomb. Its abstract but existential implications are especially present today as a driver of both conversation and human behavior in an unprecedented way. Will the unleashing of nuclear weapons be the sadly predictable end of mankind that our worst nightmares portend, or will the Bomb fulfill our greatest hopes and be a deterrent backstop that prevents a third World War and enables a global reconciliation that leads to total disarmament? Should we hate or love the Bomb, or somewhere in between?

Read more about the paradoxes, the hatelove of the bomb, and some unsolicited advice from a cat in the article on Wild Blue Yonder.

We Are the Cat: How Schrödinger Can Teach Us to Hatelove the Bomb was originally published on Global Security Review.