Putin and Missile Defense Malaise: Broadening US Options

Introduction

On 1 March 2018, President Vladimir Putin promised a new generation of Russian nuclear weapons specifically intended to circumvent US strategic missile defenses.¹ The weapons mentioned in Putin’s presentation to the Federal Assembly included an intercontinental cruise missile, a hypersonic glide weapon, and a long-range nuclear torpedo, in addition to other nuclear-capable delivery systems in development and/or deployment. One of the reasons for Russo–American and NATO–Russian divergence on missile defenses is the Russian concern that NATO regional and US global missile defenses could overturn the stability of nuclear deterrence based on assured retaliation.² Although Moscow’s concerns are understandable, given Russia’s dependence on nuclear weapons to deter or stop a feared invasion from the West, US planning assumes that advanced ballistic missile defenses in Europe exist to protect NATO allies from small-scale attacks from Iran—not Russia.³

On the other hand, missile defenses can be tasked to protect retaliatory forces as their priority, or singular, mission. For example, terminal antimissile defenses for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), deployed in missile silos, could be designed to protect those retaliatory forces from first strikes instead of populations from retaliatory attacks. The possibility of defending silo-based ICBMs with terminal ballistic missile defenses (BMD) to reduce their first-strike vulnerability was studied during the Cold War and subsequently by the US government and various defense contractors.⁴ The Nixon administration approved deployment of the Sentinel-Safeguard system, with a primary mission of defending retaliatory forces, in 1969, but the United States subsequently mothballed the system after agreeing to the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972.⁵

In the sections that follow, we first consider some of the military-strategic and arms control issues that have complicated US– and NATO–Russian dialogue on missile defenses. In the second section, we analyze the hypothetical impacts that ICBM silo defenses deployed by the United States and Russia might have on deterrence and arms control stability, including consideration of possible alternatives.⁶ The development and eventual deployment by Russia and the United States of advanced hypersonic weapons make this topic especially timely. Hypersonics could pose time-urgent threats to both fixed and mobile strategic launchers, but especially to silo-based ICBMs.⁷

Post–Cold War and Missile Defenses

The United States and Russia now field 80 percent fewer operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons than during the Cold War. As table 1 illustrates, the United States and Russia each field a force with a slightly different mix of warheads and delivery vehicles—all of which meet the requirements of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).

Table 1. New START Treaty aggregate numbers of strategic offensive arms

*Under New START counting rules, each bomber counts as one warhead.

Source: US Department of State, New START Treaty Aggregate Numbers of Strategic Offensive Arms (Washington, DC: US Department of State, 2019).

At the same time the number of operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons was in dramatic decline, the United States refused efforts on the development of antiballistic missile defenses.⁸ Antiballistic missile defense technologies are of interest not only to the United States and Russia but also to other states who feel threatened by the spread of ballistic missiles outside of Europe. The spread of ballistic missiles and the decline of nuclear arsenals occurred independently but ultimately converged in their significant impact on strategic stability. One example is prescient. Japan, a nonnuclear state, would prefer neither to join the ranks of nuclear weapons states nor to enter into a regional nuclear arms race. It is, however, very interested in antimissile defenses as a defense against a limited nuclear strike—possibly from North Korea. Japan is already cooperating with the United States in developing and deploying theater missile defenses for its state territory and contiguous waters.⁹ This stance is not unreasonable from Japan’s perspective, considering its proximity to North Korea, China, and other Asian nuclear powers. Missile defenses might provide for a country like Japan or South Korea an alternative “deterrent by denial” instead of a nuclear deterrent by threat of unacceptable second-strike retaliation.¹⁰ Antiballistic missile defenses could also serve as an insurance policy against accidental launches or unauthorized rogue attacks. Table 2 summarizes active and planned phases of the US–NATO European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA) missile defense plan, which could be replicated in Japan, Korea, or elsewhere.

Table 2. European Phased Adaptive Approach to missile defense*

*Separate national contributions to the mission of European BMD have been announced by Netherlands and France.

Source: Karen Kaya, “NATO Missile Defense and the View from the Front Line,” Joint Force Quarterly, 71, no. 4 (2013), 84-89.

Key:

Aegis Ashore = land-based component of the Aegis BMD system;

AN/TPY-2 (FBM) = Army Navy/Transportable Radar Surveillance,

Model 2 (Forward-based Mode)

BMD = ballistic missile defense

C2BMC = command, control, battle management, and communications

ICBM = intercontinental ballistic missile

IRBM = intermediate-range ballistic missile

MRBM = medium-range ballistic missile

The Obama administration’s attempt to “reset” relations with Russia led to the conclusion of the New START agreement and to a temporary thaw in US–Russia and Russia–NATO relations on the issue of missile defenses.¹¹ However, the thaw was temporary, as animosity over missile defenses returned in 2011–2012 when the Obama administration missile defense plan for Europe became clearer and its implications for Russia became a presidential election issue.¹²

To appease the Russians, then–US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced in 2013 that the Pentagon would cancel plans for the fourth phase of EPAA, regarded as the phase most objectionable to Russia, which viewed the system as a way to undermine Russian nuclear deterrence. Neither President Putin nor his military leadership was mollified by this US decision.¹³ Moscow continued to demand either a change in the US plan or a Russian level of involvement and participation in designing the European BMD system that would satisfy Russia’s nervous military leaders and politicians as to American and NATO intentions and capabilities.¹⁴

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Figure 1. Russia resurgent. As President Putin strives to rebuild Russia’s international standing, Moscow has become increasingly adversarial toward the West.

Russian leaders persist in indicating that, if dissatisfied with respect to European missile defenses, they will decline further cooperation in offensive nuclear arms reductions and possibly deploy missiles capable of launching nonstrategic nuclear weapons closer to Russia’s borders with NATO.¹⁵ In addition, the United States and Russia suspended their commitments to maintaining the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, and one of Russia’s arguments for doing so was its insistence that US antimissile system (Aegis ashore) deployments in Romania and prospectively Poland could also be used for launching offensive missiles of medium or intermediate ranges.¹⁶

Russia is especially sensitive to NATO’s reach into former Soviet and “near-abroad” states and security space, within which Russia claims privileged interests.¹⁷ These sensitivities to NATO visibility in post-Soviet space bordering Russia extend to any plans for NATO land-based interceptors, radars, or other components of a European missile defense plan. Proximity assists with the accuracy of antiballistic missile defenses, so it should come as no surprise that, despite American assurances, Russia is deeply concerned about the placement of such systems in former Warsaw Pact nations.

Methodology

The probable performance of antiballistic missile defenses against offensive second-strike retaliation is unknown due to the uncertainties of current and future ballistic missile defense technologies.¹⁸ Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to assume that the larger the offensive retaliatory force the more challenging the problem is for the defense. In addition, missile defenses to protect populations, as opposed to retaliatory forces or other “hard” targets, are incredibly demanding because the arithmetic greatly favors the attacker.¹⁹ Even a small number of warheads penetrating a defense and aimed at population centers could create historically unprecedented destruction.

Thus, defenses of population centers have to be perfect or nearly perfect to be appealing to scientists or to deterrence theorists—but not necessarily to governments. Governments might reason that even imperfect defenses complicate the prospective first striker’s attack plans, at least at the margin, and that in a crisis any hesitancy works in favor of the defender. This reasoning might be more compelling if defenses were deployed to protect retaliatory forces instead of populations. The formidable challenge facing population defenses against large-scale missile attacks has been shown in a number of analyses. For example, one study estimated the numbers of US direct, short-term casualties and collateral damage to medical facilities from various Russian nuclear attacks in 2002.²⁰ In one scenario, a Russian attack against US population targets using 500 weapons of 550kt each is opposed by US antimissile defenses of variable capability. The Russian targeting plan is deliberately structured to maximize US population losses, and 25 percent of the Russian warheads are assumed to malfunction. US missile defense intercept capabilities range from 0 percent to 30 percent of the attacking warheads. Summary results include those shown in table 3, as below.

Table 3. Estimated Casualties: 500 Warhead Attack on Population Centers, US Missile Defenses

Source: Ira Helfand, MD; Lachlan Forrow, MD; Michael McCally, MD, PhD; and Robert K. Musil, MPH, PhD, “Projected US Casualties and Destruction of US Medical Services from Attacks by Russian Nuclear Forces,” Medicine and Global Survival 7, no. 2 (February 2002): 68–76, excerpted from table 3, p. 73.

If the task of defending populations against large-scale attacks seems hopeless, a cost-effective alternative would be the fielding of antiballistic missile defenses for the United States’ retaliatory forces. Given the current level of technology, such a system would have a sufficient kill probability that an attacker—Russia—would be required to dramatically increase the number of ICBMs used in a first strike, potentially making such a strike untenable. With missile defenses for US retaliatory forces intended to dilute an attacker’s first strike, not its retaliatory second strike, such systems could not face the same criticism as EPAA currently faces. Therefore, Russia’s complaint, that US or NATO missile defenses are really intended to deter Russia and not Iran would be less credible on that point. Of course, the United States and NATO might still want to deploy some version of EPAA against Iran or other states to the south of Europe, but they could do so more unambiguously without provoking Russian concerns about nullification of Russia’s deterrent.

As mentioned above, the primary advantage of using missile defenses for retaliatory forces instead of cities is that the arithmetic is much more favorable to the defender, compared to the case of population defenses. The defense of missile silos against first strikes, for example, need not perform perfectly to exert meaningful attrition against an attack. Even so-called simple-novel ground-based antiballistic missile defenses or other available technologies could conceivably raise the “attack price” for destroying a silo from two to four warheads (or more), depending on accuracy and yield of an attacker’s weapons.²¹ If, for example, the United States deploys 400 Minuteman III ICBMs, a Russian first strike, for example, will likely include a salvo of between 800 and 900 warheads devoted to ICBM launch facilities and launch control centers.²² While this was not an impossible challenge for the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it certainly presents a significant challenge for Russia under New START. This problem is potentially insurmountable if antiballistic missile defenses are fielded to protect American ICBM fields.

Data Analysis

Would American or Russian ICBM defenses that incrementally raised the attack price against ICBM silos provide additional security worthy of the investment? In charts 1–3, we summarize the results of nuclear force exchanges between Russian and American strategic nuclear forces at prewar maximum deployment levels of 1,550, 1,000, and 500 warheads for each state. In charts 4–6, we simulate the outcomes of nuclear exchanges at maximum warhead deployment levels of 1,550, 1,000, and 500 for the United States and for Russia, each having deployed ICBM defenses that increase the survivability of silo-based missiles compared to the “no defenses” condition.²³

Chart 1. US–Russia: Surviving and Retaliating Warheads, 1,550 Deployment Limit

Key:

Gen/LOW = Generated Alert/Launch on Warning

Gen/RO = Generated Alert/Riding Out the Attack

Day/LOW = Day-to-Day Alert/Launch on Warning

Day/RO = Day-to-Day Alert/Riding Out the Attack

Chart 2. US–Russia: Surviving and Retaliating Warheads, 1,000 Deployment Limit

Chart 3. US–Russia: Surviving and Retaliating Warheads, 500 Deployment Limit

Chart 4. US–Russia: Surviving and Retaliating Warheads, 1,550 Deployment Limit, ICBM Defenses

Chart 5. US–Russia: Surviving and Retaliating Warheads, 1,000 Deployment Limit, ICBM Defenses

Chart 6. US–Russia: Surviving and Retaliating Warheads, 500 Deployment Limit, ICBM Defenses

The results summarized in charts 1–6 show that silo defenses could increase the percentage of surviving and retaliating ICBM warheads, relative to the undefended condition. The question is whether the improvement in outcomes for ICBM survivors is meaningful in terms of strategy. The picture is mixed. On one hand, the overall numbers of US and Russian ICBMs that survive a first strike and are available for retaliation increase, compared to the undefended condition; however, this does not change the basic structure of assured retaliation. With or without ICBM antiballistic missile defenses, the United States and Russia can guarantee adequate numbers of surviving and retaliating weapons (bomber or ballistic missile submarine delivered) to destroy any attacker as a modern society. Of course, this becomes more challenging as operationally deployed strategic weapons decline from 1,550 to 1,000, or even 500 weapons.

It might be supposed that Russia, because of its greater relative dependency on ICBMs as opposed to submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM), gains relatively more than the United States does under the assumption of technologically symmetrical silo-defense deployments. However, Russian and US ICBM basing are not symmetrical. All American ICBMs are silo-based and in launch facilities that have not been hardened to account for the increasing accuracy of Russian ICBMs, while Russia’s silo-based ICBMs are in launch facilities that were hardened.²⁴ A number of Russian ICBMs are also mobile land-based missiles. In our analysis for this study, no defenses were added for Russian mobile ICBMs, only for Russian ICBMs that are silo-based.

Upsides and Downsides: Risks and Benefits

Regardless of these considerations, from a military and deterrence standpoint, there are two potential benefits the deployment of antiballistic missile defenses provide the ICBM force and deterrence—compared to the undefended condition. First, an attacker cannot know the exact performance of antiballistic missile defenses under crisis or wartime conditions; even the defender will be estimating success based on tests and simulations. These unknown parameters of missile defense performance “under fire” will complicate an attacker’s first-strike confidence. Second, the availability of silo defenses can allow leaders to feel less pressure to “use them or lose them” and increase confidence against a decision to strike preemptively. Opponents of antiballistic missile defense systems argue that current ABM technology does not perform particularly well, is too costly, and will always be overwhelmed by greater offensive weapons.²⁵ In many respects, these critiques are true but irrelevant. Antiballistic missile defenses, even mediocre ones, change the calculus for attacking ICBM fields and ensure that a portion of ICBMs are available for countervalue strikes. ABM systems need not be perfect. Mediocre is good enough.

Apart from these pros and cons for deterrence and nuclear crisis stability, there is also the issue of arms race stability. US antiballistic missile defenses for ICBMs might provoke Russian or Chinese countermeasures in the form of their own missile defenses or offsetting modernization of offenses. Russian or Chinese ICBM defenses might have a similar effect on the United States. But in all cases, ICBM silo defenses would not be a threat to the second-strike capability of another state. Thus, the potential for creating stability is a net positive.

Regardless of US strategic nuclear force size, the strategic logic for deploying available missile defense technologies to defend the ICBM force, and encourage Russia to do the same, is overwhelming. Since Russia is even more dependent on ICBMs as a makeweight of its strategic nuclear forces, the fielding of antiballistic missile systems is a logical proposition. As mentioned, there are drawbacks to these systems that leave decision makers in a number of advanced nations uninterested in their development.

First, for a cash-strapped country like Russia, antiballistic missile systems are expensive. Developing the scientific and industrial infrastructure to build and field such systems is a challenge for any nation.²⁶ While a nation like Iran can build a ballistic missile, building a missile that can hit another missile in flight is a completely different proposition. Another issue for antiballistic missile defenses is that two of the three components of the US nuclear triad, submarines and bombers, are presumptively survivable without missile defenses, provided (especially in the case of bombers) sufficient warning is available.

A final reason for lack of interest in missile defenses for ICBMs is more controversial from an arms control perspective. ICBMs are the quick reaction component of the US and Russian nuclear triads. Although SLBMs can also be tasked for prompt launch missions, their uniqueness lies in their unmatched survivability. ICBMs also do not have to move to another location before firing after receiving duly authorized launch commands, as ballistic missile submarines do. It is also worth noting that although the command, control, and communications (C3) systems for ballistic missile submarines are reportedly as reliable as those for strategic land-based missiles, the latter are not quite as complicated.²⁷

On the other hand, some arms control experts maintain that the United States and Russia maintain too many ICBM warheads on ready alert for prompt launch, creating a “hair trigger” problem during a prospective nuclear crisis.²⁸ And other arms control experts argue that the Cold War history of strategic missile defenses, whether deployed by the United States or by the Soviet Union, was that they generated offsetting changes in the other side’s force modernization and nuclear targeting plans, including specific plans for the suppression of missile defenses.²⁹

Conclusion

It is beyond the scope of this study to survey all candidate missile defense technologies or missions. Its focus is on the question of whether Russo–American disagreements about missile defenses could be partially mitigated by the substitution of unambiguously “defensive” BMD deployments for those capable of second-strike nullification.³⁰ Missile defenses remain debatable as technological game changers for the stability of strategic nuclear deterrence as between the United States and Russia. One complication is that, as Keith B. Payne has warned, the very concept of nuclear-strategic “stability” is more ambiguous and contestable than it was during the Cold War years:

In the contemporary era, there can be no generally-applicable “rule of thumb” derived from the US-Soviet experience for predicting that a particular set of US capabilities will be “stabilizing” or “destabilizing” across a spectrum of potential adversaries and contexts. In some cases, for example, rather than being a cause of deterrence “instability” as envisaged in the Cold War construct, US BMD capabilities able to defeat an adversary’s prospective missile attack may well be key to denying the political or military value that would underlie an adversary’s decision to attack, i.e., missile defense in such a case would rightly be deemed “stabilizing.”³¹

On the other hand, US current and proposed missile defenses in Europe have already contributed to friction with Russia over security issues, including the stability of mutual deterrence based on assured second-strike retaliation. The preceding analysis suggests that, all things being equal, deploying missile defenses tasked uniquely for the protection of retaliatory forces instead of populations could reduce first-strike vulnerability for US and Russian silo-based ICBMs, increasing their confidence in assured retaliation. On the other hand, the two states could reduce ICBM vulnerability by other means, including the replacement of silo-based ICBMs by mobile missiles.³² Decision makers would obviously have to take into account the cost factors in protecting ICBM silos with BMD, compared to other options, including a shift from silo to mobile ICBM basing.³³

Some in the arms control community would solve the issue of ICBM basing by moving to a dyad of US strategic nuclear retaliatory forces, eliminating ICBMs. Others have proposed that the United States rely on a strategic nuclear “monad” of SLBMs. In either case, eliminating one or two legs of the US triad, advocates of such a move suggest conventionally armed missiles and/or bombers could be substituted for nuclear-armed delivery systems of the same type. From the standpoint of stable deterrence and nuclear arms control, however, elimination of one or more arms of the nuclear triad is not necessarily a “plus.” In fact, the opposite may be the case. As Russian and American strategic nuclear arsenals are reduced in size, the diversity of the triad becomes more, not less, important for survivability and, therefore, for stability.³⁴

From a more inclusive perspective, symmetrical nuclear arms reductions, as between the United States and Russia, may no longer have symmetrical effects, as assumed to be the case during the Cold War. According to Keith Darden and Timofei Bordachev, the United States and Russia should seek not only strategic stability based on mutual deterrence but also strategic compatibility, allowing for differing but compatible security portfolios.³⁵ The objective would be to disconnect arms control from an exclusive reliance on parity and symmetry as indicators of security and stability.³⁶ Stability through compatibility, instead of symmetry and parity in forces and deployments, is certainly one option that policy makers will need to consider in a complicated twenty-first century.

Although we did not discuss the issue here, technological developments are also set to dramatically change the dynamic of nuclear deterrence. New low-observable cruise missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles that can strike with little or no warning, for example, may upend our strategic planning calculus, as the United States seeks to find new ways to either address or circumvent these and other capabilities.³⁷ Whatever the future may hold for nuclear forces, the need to ensure their survivability is becoming increasingly complex and deserving of considerable discussion.

Dr. Stephen J. Cimbala

Stephen J. Cimbala is a distinguished professor of political science, Penn State Brandywine, an American studies faculty member, and the author of numerous books and articles in the fields of international security studies, defense policy, nuclear weapons and arms control, intelligence, and other fields. He is a graduate of Penn State, having received his BA in journalism in 1965. He received an MA in 1967, and his PhD in 1969, both in political science, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He serves on the editorial boards of various professional journals, has consulted for a number of US government agencies and defense contractors, and is frequently quoted in the media on national security topics.

Dr. Adam Lowther

Dr. Adam Lowther is a professor of political science at the US Army School of Advanced Military Studies, the former director of the US Air Force’s School for Advanced Nuclear Deterrence Studies, and the former director of the Air Force Research Institute’s Center for Academic and Professional Journals. He holds a PhD in international relations from the University of Alabama. Dr. Lowther is the author of numerous journal articles and books focused on international relations and military affairs.

Notes