Rethinking Armageddon Scenario Planning in the Second Nuclear Age

RETHINKING ARMAGEDDON SCENARIO PLANNING IN THE SECOND NUCLEAR AGE ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH JACOB COHN RETHINKING ARMAGEDDON SCENARIO PLANNING IN THE SECOND NUCLEAR AGE ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH JACOB COHN 2016 ABOUT THE CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS (CSBA) The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments is an independent, nonpartisan policy research institute established to promote innovative thinking and debate about national security strategy and investment options. CSBA’s analysis focuses on key questions related to existing and emerging threats to U.S. national security, and its goal is to enable policymakers to make informed decisions on matters of strategy, security policy, and resource allocation. ©2016 Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. All rights reserved. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Dr. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. is President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He assumed this position in 1993, following a 21-year career in the U.S. Army. During his military career Dr. Krepinevich served in the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment, and on the personal staff of three secretaries of defense. He has also served as a member of the National Defense Panel, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Joint Experimentation, the Joint Forces Command Advisory Board, and the Defense Policy Board. He currently serves on the Chief of Naval Operations’ Executive Panel, and the Advisory Board of Business Executives for National Security. Dr. Krepinevich frequently contributes to print and broadcast media. He has lectured before a wide range of professional and academic audiences, and has served as a consultant on military affairs for many senior government officials, including several secretaries of defense, the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) National Intelligence Council, and all four military services. He has testified frequently before Congress. A graduate of West Point, Dr. Krepinevich holds an M.P.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has taught on the faculties of West Point, George Mason University, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and Georgetown University. Jacob Cohn is a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, conducting research and analysis for both the Strategic Studies and the Budget Studies programs. His primary areas of interest concern trends in the overall defense budget and specific acquisition programs, long-range strategic planning, and the utilization of wargames to develop future operational concepts. Prior to joining CSBA in 2014, Mr. Cohn served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa, worked in the Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict office at the Pentagon, and was a grants and budget manager for CARE USA. Mr. Cohn holds a B.A. in Economics and Math with Highest Honors from Emory University and an M.A. in Strategic Studies and International Economics from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank the CSBA staff for their assistance with this report. Special thanks go to Ryan Boone for his assistance assessing the capability to defend against a “haystack” attack and Kamilla Gunzinger for her production assistance. Thanks are in order for Eric Edelman and Evan Montgomery for their review and comments on drafts of this report. Last, but certainly not least, thanks are owed to the report’s editor, Keith Tidman, for enhancing both the style and substance of this report. Any shortcomings, however, are solely the responsibility of the authors. Contents EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .................................................................. i INTRODUCTION ........................................................................ 1 IRAN .............................................................................. 19 RUSSIA ............................................................................ 43 NORTH KOREA ...................................................................... 65 CHINA ............................................................................. 83 CONCLUSION ....................................................................... 109 APPENDIX A ....................................................................... 125 LIST OF ACRONYMS ................................................................. 130 www.csbaonline.org i Executive Summary For much of the forty-six-year Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, many of the West’s most gifted strategists focused their talents on how to prevent the two nuclear superpowers from engaging in a war that could destroy them both as functioning soci- eties—and perhaps the rest of the human race along with them. With the Soviet Union’s col- lapse in 1991, the threat of nuclear Armageddon receded dramatically. The Cold War was also characterized by a bipolar international system and a correspond- ing bipolar nuclear competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. While a few other states, such as Great Britain and France, also possessed nuclear arms, their arsenals were very small compared to those of the two superpowers. The world is far different today. On the one hand, both the United States and Russia have far smaller nuclear arsenals than they did at the Cold War’s end. The New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) agreement limits each country to no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons. At the same time, new nuclear powers have emerged. These developments have introduced a shift from the bipolar Cold War nuclear competition to an increasingly multipolar competition among nuclear powers. This assessment employs scenario-based planning as a means of better understanding the competitive dynamics of what has become known as the Second Nuclear Age and the implications for U.S. interests, with an emphasis on preserving the seventy-one-year tradition of non- use of nuclear weapons (since their only use in 1945), also known as the “nuclear taboo.” With this in mind, the assessment explores, among other things, the implications of the Second Nuclear Age for extended deterrence, crisis stability, missile defense, prompt conventional global strike, growing multipolar or “n-player competitions, and planning assumptions as they have been influenced by advances in the cognitive sciences, to include prospect theory. Why Scenarios? Scenarios can be thought of as a vision of what the future world might look like, or a set of plausible and strategically relevant futures. Done well, scenarios can help us identify potential ii CSBA | RETHINKING ARMEGEDDON threats and opportunities with an eye towards taking steps now to avoid the former and increase the odds of realizing the latter. By describing a path from the current world to a future world, scenarios can also help us understand the factors that may divert the world from its current course. Identifying these factors can be important since they may serve as early indicators that we are moving into a different and potentially more dangerous future. Scenarios are not intended to predict or forecast the future. There are too many variables, dynamically interacting in exponentially growing ways, shaping the nuclear competition to attempt to predict with precision what it will be like even a few years into the future. Rather, scenarios help us to think about the future, in part by helping us challenge our embedded assumptions about what it might look like. By developing scenarios that include obvious as well as less obvious futures, this process also enables policymakers to hedge against uncer- tainty. Indeed, a crucial lesson that emerges from scenario-based planning is the need to pre- pare, or at least hedge, against the prospect that a future that reflects the characteristics of one or several scenarios may emerge. Key Insights This assessment includes five scenarios divided between three regions where tensions among nuclear and other major regional powers are increasing: Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. The scenarios also have a temporal aspect to them with four focusing on the immediate issue of crisis stability and one focusing on a long-term competition among China, Russia, and the United States. The insights below were identified in the scenarios, and indicate how the Second Nuclear Age might be different than the First. Competitive Dynamics of the Second Nuclear Age The scenarios suggest that the increasing importance of non-nuclear strategic weapons, the shift from bipolar to multipolar competition, and a rewritten and expanded escalation ladder will characterize the Second Nuclear Age. Put another way, the Cold War “nuclear balance” has evolved into the broader “strategic balance” that includes non-nuclear weapons capable of achieving strategic effects, such as cyber weapons and precision weapons, as well as advanced air and missile defenses. Nuclear proliferation and the potential expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal suggest that the Second Nuclear Age strategic competition might be increasingly multipolar. This competition might exist within the kind of fluid and dynamic international system not seen since before World War II. Establishing a stable strategic balance becomes much more complicated in a fluid international system where the nuclear powers can quickly shift into new alliances and partnerships. For instance, the branch within the Iran scenario suggests that the addition of even one nuclear power, in this case Saudi Arabia, to an Iran-Israel

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