Ready for some grim reading? I don’t mean the talk-show line-up for the day. I mean really grim.

It’s the 132-page Defense Science Board’s  Report of the Task Force On Nuclear Weapon Effects and Test, Evaluation, and Simulation. Yikes and a half.

In a nutshell, they’re preparing to fight nuclear war.

Look. I know they do this stuff all the time. Have been since I was a tyke. You’d think I’d have gotten used to it, learned to accept it by now. On the contrary. Scares me more now than 20 years ago. Because then, we had Mutually Assured Destruction in full force. Mostly us and the Russians loaded and cocked behind tens of thousands of megatons of wastemakers that neither side could wipe out without the other side getting in a massive return salvo. The balance of terror, as we called it.
Some people – U.S. government people – used to argue that an all-out nuclear exchange wouldn’t necessarily wipe out humanity. I suppose some Soviet apparatchiks made that argument, too. But even the most hawkish optimists had to admit the casualty count would be horrific. The best results estimated by U.S. officials in the early `80s was 44 million immediately dead Americans. Worse for the Soviets. And that would just be the beginning. Next comes radiation sickness and contamination. Disease. Chaos. Savage competition for scarce resources. Barter Town.

At the time, some considerable skepticism arose over an idea first promoted by Carl Sagan and some colleagues about whether torching broad swaths of three continents would send soot and smoke high into the atmosphere and filter out sunlight in a wide band around the most inhabited parts of the planet for a couple of years, cooling things off considerably, playing havoc with the growing season and causing mass starvation: nuclear winter. Bad modeling, said some. Weak data, said others. Agenda-driven science, said others still. Maybe so. But even those who denied the concept of war as climate changer had to concede a full-out exchange would be exceptionally bad news.

Knowing that, only somebody megalomaniacal, extremely depressed or insane would actually start a planet-paving war. You knew we or the Soviets might get stuck with a Dr. Strangelove, but probably not.  So, in a way, the MAD strategy made you feel a little bit safer than you would have without it as long as nobody tried an end-run around any of its safeguards. Or a false alert of an enemy attack didn’t turn into Armageddon.

But the job of generals and their bosses from antiquity has been to find a way around the enemy’s strategy. This is made more complex when the enemy’s strategy is also your strategy. One way to throw MAD out of balance would be to orbit weapons in space and build a ground-based, ship-based missile defense system. Assuming such a system worked, you could launch a first-strike attack with your own nuclear missiles, then mop up whatever surviving missiles your enemy managed to launch in return fire. To observe legal niceties, this first strike would, of course, be called pre-emptive.

MAD still exists, but the prospects of a strategic war between the two great antagonists have not been so unlikely for nearly six decades. And the Defense Science Board puts a strategic, all-out nuclear war at the bottom of its list of nuclear threats. Yet regional nuclear war, including with the Russians, is, the DSB  claims, more likely than before:

Despite the reduction of the threat of strategic nuclear exchange, it is becoming
more, not less, likely that U.S. forces will have to operate in a nuclear environment in regional operations. This is driven by the proliferation of nuclear weapon capabilities and the attractiveness of nuclear weapons as an offset to U.S. conventional superiority and as a counter to U.S. preemptive doctrine. …

Although nuclear weapons will have much less impact in political and military calculations than at the height of the Cold War, it appears that they will have a significant, albeit different, role in the years ahead. Importantly, the attitude of many other countries regarding nuclear weapons is evolving in a manner quite different from ours, with selected nations viewing nuclear weapons as a legitimate, asymmetric war fighting tool. This Task Force believes that the U.S. is, unavoidably, entering a future in which the probability of nuclear weapon use by others is higher than during the Cold War. The U.S. must create resources agile enough to confront the nuclear challenges of the next 15 years

A good deal of the DSB’s report is given over to the need to accurately simulate nuclear effects in order to more effectively harden military machinery’s ability to survive in that lovely euphemism, “a nuclear environment.” Difficult to disagree with that. Generals who don’t protect their assets lose.  

However, with the possible exception of North Korea – whose most honored and beloved dear leader may well be megalomaniacal, insane and depressed – I don’t buy the argument that other nation states are going to present a credible nuclear threat to the United States any time soon. Seems to me there’s little doubt in the minds of the Iranians, for instance, that use of any nukes they build would get them nuked at least 10 times over. The mullahs are mean, not crazy.

Suicidal terrorists with a nuke? Does anybody think that can’t happen? Some day, no doubt. But how likely is it going to be used against a hardened target? About 10,000 to 1, I would calculate. Arriving in a crate, or a trawler or maybe some purloined or purchased cruise missile, it will probably be pointed at a city or a port.

As for the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield as a positive thing, who’s talking about that the most? Hint: It’s not Kim Jung-il.

A Russian military newspaper notes that

“…nuclear weapons are now the main and a relatively cheap means of deterrence, and during an emergency period the main weapon for conducting combat operations to ensure the territorial integrity of Russia and its allies.”

So, Moscow would use nukes to deter its enemies – the MAD strategy – and actually fight with them if under attack. But, then, everybody says they’ll actually use their nuclear weapons if attacked; if they said otherwise, who would be deterred?

The United States under Bush is another story. Since the leaking of truly scary Nuclear Posture Review in 2001, we’ve known that the Administration is hell-bent on building the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, the so-called “bunker buster” with an explosive yield equal to 10 times what was dropped on Hiroshima. That plus mini-nukes, warheads with less than a tenth the yield of the Hiroshima bomb for tactical battlefield use. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, a key advocate of mini-nukes, has argued, as have others, nobody wants to use the current crop of nukes because their devastation is so great. Key advantage of mini-nukes? Less reluctance to use them.

Last December, a narrow bipartisan vote in Congress chopped $27.6 million off the RNEP budget and also eliminated $9 million for mini-nuke research. As we know too well, however, this Administration finds ways around obstacles to its plans. As William D. Hartung of the World Policy Institute noted shortly before Dubyanocchio took office, the Bush Administration seems determined to go from MAD to NUTS.