Members of Congress always claim to be looking out for wasteful spending, especially now that they need to get under the spending caps contained in the Budget Control Act. If they are serious, they should target the “nuclear triad,” the three different means — manned bombers, long-range missiles and submarine-launched missiles — that U.S. forces can use to deliver nuclear weapons.
Even by the most merciless arithmetic, this triple threat is unnecessary. Congress should take the advice of experts like former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright and decommission either the bomber or ICBM leg while cutting the forces in the remaining two legs, leaving a deployed warhead total under 500.
The triad’s rationale is that diversity of delivery vehicles ensures that the nation’s nuclear forces cannot all be wiped out easily, so that enemies can never be certain of avoiding a retaliatory response. But that story is a post hoc rationalization for a force bloated by parochialism between the service branches.
The real reason the triad exists is that the Air Force, having failed to either prevent or control the proliferation of ballistic missile submarines by the early 1970s, coined the term “triad” as part of a marketing effort to protect their bombers. Air Force officials had previously argued that missile submarines weren’t necessary to keep the Soviets in check. When the Navy developed nuclear-armed submarines in the late 1950s, its leaders began to question the survivability of bombers and ICBMs.
Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke advocated for “finite deterrence” — maintaining the smallest arsenal that deterrence requires, by which he meant a system based mostly on submarines. Of the multiplicity of delivery systems, he said, “You very seldom see a cowboy, even in the movies, wearing three guns. Two is enough.”
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