How missile defense and conventional precision-guided weapons can complicate further Deep Cuts in nuclear weapons
| Working Paper
Since the start of Barack Obama’s presidency, all expert analysis had ignored the conventional weapons dimension and focused instead on assessing the challenges to a nuclear weapons-free world. However, with the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, in the spring of 2010, did it become clear just how deeply the new administration would embrace its conventional weapons superiority and how this would constrain nuclear weapon reductions.
Abstract
Since Barack Obama’s start of the U.S. presidency, America faces a conundrum: how can the United States at once reassure its allies and partners by demonstrating the potency of its unrivalled conventional superiority without unsetting the very strategic stability it asserts is so central to achieving the goal of a nuclear weapons-free world? In particular, there are a number of impediments standing in the way of adequately addressing America’s conventional advantages vis-à-vis Russia and China. Above all, it has always been a sacrosanct principle of U.S. strategic planning that the United States will pursue achieving and maintaining technological superiority.
This paper addresses the difficult question of how missile defense and conventional precision-guided weapons complicate achieving deep cuts in nuclear weapons - particularly with a view to the strategic relationships to Russia and China.