I’m been reading comments by Trump supporters cheering his “fire and fury” threats toward North Korea. Trump’s “fire and fury” supporters claim our nuclear war policy has been a “failure.” Some limit their blame to President Obama and 8 years of failure. Other extend the years of failure back to Bush, Reagan, or back a full 50+ years.
The horror of our dropping nuclear bombs on the non-military Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shocked the world. With the end of the Second World War, experts came up with a strategy they hoped would prevent future nuclear attacks on civilian populations.
The strategy they came up with was called “mutually assured destruction (MAD).” At that time there were only two nuclear nations - the U.S. and U.S.S.R. The agreement was that both sides would get enough nuclear power to not only destroy the other side, but to survive a first attack and destroy the other side.
Each side was given three delivery systems - land based missiles, submarines, and planes. The agreement gave the U.S.S.R. more land based missiles. Land based missiles are the most vulnerable of the three delivery systems. Everyone knows where they are so they are vulnerable in a sneak attack. So back in the late 1980s, some came up with the idea of putting our land based nukes on trains and moving then around six western States. Because there are legal limits to the number of land based nukes, to confuse the Russians and make it harder to follow those trains, we would have a many fake nukes on trains. It was a 3-card monte game played with nukes on trains.
That never happened. It was cost prohibitive and people in those six States didn’t like the idea of nukes traveling through their towns and cities. Ironically, Russia is now considering this plan for their land based nukes. It might be because Russia is much smaller than the U.S.S.R.
The U.S. has a large advantage in submarines. First, our silence technology makes our submarines so much harder to track than Russia’s noisy subs. Second, we have two large coasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans where our sub can come and depart from. Russia has no access to the Atlantic. In fact, they have only one sub port near Japan. We know where all Russian subs are at all times while they most likely don’t know where ours are much of the time.
You might remember or heard about the Korean Air Lines Flight 007 that was shot down in 1983 during the Reagan administration by a Soviet Su-15. The crew and all 269 passenger, including 62 Americans died. Among the Americans was Congressman Larry McDonald from Georgia. McDonald, one of the more conservative members of Congress who was also the president of the John Birch Society.
The plane had deviated from its original scheduled flight plan and flew through Soviet prohibited airspace near their only submarine base. The U.S.S.R. treated the plane as spy plane and shot it down after warning shots were ignored. Because submarines are viewed as most reliable delivery system to survive a first attack, it is understandable why the Soviets were so touchy about Flight 007.
Military experts agreed the U.S. had an advantage with planes as a delivery system. For decades we always had at least one plane in the air loaded with a nuclear bombs. While that is no longer the case, our planes could do serious damage after a first strike.
Reagan proposed a fourth delivery system. He proposed it as a defensive system called Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Congress got excited about this proposal. The idea that we could protect ourselves from a first strike attack was appealing. The entire plan collapsed when someone finally asked the details of how it would work. The plan called for nuclear bombs to be placed in satellites circling the earth. There were two problems with this. First, if a rocket blew up launching the satellite, Florida, Texas, or California might be radioactive for millions of years. Second, should the defensive system be used offensively, nuclear bombs in satellites increases the chance of first strike attacks. A nation would have less than 5 minutes between launching the bomb and striking its target.
Let’s get back to our North Korean problem. Since those early days, the number of nuclear nations has increased for two to nine. But the basic “mutually assured destruction” strategy has not changed. While Trump and his supporters are calling the strategy a “failure,” there hasn’t been a nuclear bombs dropped on people for 72 years.
Why does North Korea want to be a nuclear power? They watched what happened to Libya and Iraq when they gave up their nuclear programs. While I detest everything about North Korea, I understand their reasoning.
While all of our Presidents have honored the No First Strike (NFS) policy, the U.S. has refused to sign a NFS agreement. But Trump and many of his supporters have threatened a first strike on North Korea.
How would a “first strike policy” change the dynamics? If you think another nation is going to strike you first, without warning, what is your best strategy? Obviously, you should hit them first.
Trump and his supporters are claiming the strategy that has prevented nuclear war for the past 72 years had been a failure. That is a failure I can live with.