A North Korean Hwasong-13 ballistic missile.
Nuclear war is by far the biggest military threat to national security, and the threat is growing.
Russia has upgraded its arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles. China is steadily expanding what once was considered a minimal nuclear deterrent. North Korea successfully launched five ICBMs last year, and earlier tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile.
The U.S. currently finds itself committed to defending neighbors on the doorstep of all three countries, with no guarantee that a future crisis will not devolve into nuclear conflict.
This is not a prospect that Washington likes to think about, which presumably explains why the U.S. has no plans for intercepting a Russian or Chinese nuclear attack on America, and an inadequate system for countering North Korea’s growing arsenal.
Present strategy is to threaten potential aggressors with such overwhelming retaliation that it would be suicidal to attack.
Policymakers call this approach deterrence, but it has more aptly been described as a mutual hostage relationship since it leaves the nation largely undefended against the greatest threat to its survival.
To put it bluntly, if Russia or China or North Korea elected to launch even a handful of nuclear warheads against the U.S. in the years ahead, there is a high likelihood that millions would die and the economy would collapse in a few hours.
Many observers view that scenario as unthinkable, but in fact all three countries have specified circumstances in which they would feel compelled to use their nuclear weapons.
There are numerous ways nuclear conflict could begin:
- A foreign leader might be too irrational to be deterrable.
- Nuclear weapons might be launched accidentally.
- Ambiguous warning signals might be misread in a crisis.
- Mutinous forces might seize control of a missile field.
I could go on. What all these scenarios have in common is that the U.S. lacks a robust way of blunting the resulting aggression. The attack would likely come in the form of ballistic missiles traveling at many times the speed of sound, and the current U.S. missile defense system could only cope with around a dozen incoming warheads before failing.
The interceptors for that system are concentrated at a single base in Alaska, called Fort Greely. A few more are located at Vandenberg AFB in California, but under current firing doctrine those could only intercept one or two incoming warheads.
Given the scale of the danger and the pace at which it is evolving, the current missile defense system is grossly inadequate. And yet year after year, the Pentagon spends less than 1% of its budget on missile defense of the homeland.
This should be a scandal, but official Washington seldom thinks in concrete terms about the danger of nuclear war. Part of what makes it scandalous is that missile defense of the homeland could be bolstered for barely a day’s worth of federal spending at present rates.
If the Pentagon would replace all of the aged interceptors at Fort Greely with 60 multi-warhead Next Generation Interceptors, and build a second such site of comparable size near the East Coast, U.S. defenders would be much more capable of protecting the homeland from nuclear attack.
Prodded by Congress, the Pentagon in 2019 identified Fort Drum in upstate New York as the optimum location for a third U.S. missile defense site. The local congresswoman, Elise Stefanik, has been a tireless proponent of building such a site.
The proposed site is over 3,000 miles from Fort Greely. It is so far north in the state that it is closer to the Canadian capital of Ottawa than it is to New York City.
But that is the location best suited to complementing the interceptors at Fort Greely. The two locations, each equipped with 60 of the more capable next-gen interceptors, would be able to defeat a hundred or more incoming warheads.
This would not be sufficient to defeat a large-scale Russian or Chinese attack. Offensively-based deterrence will remain a central feature of U.S. nuclear strategy.
But two sites at widely separated locations could blunt anything North Korea is likely to field, and deal with a variety of lesser contingencies originating in Moscow or Beijing.
Officials at the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency say they have no requirement for a third site, but that’s because they have no plan to defeat even a modest attack by Russia or China—you know, the kind that only kills, say, 10 million Americans.
Additional interceptors might not be able to defeat a large-scale attack, but they certainly can give foreign leaders pause about whether the objectives of a first strike are achievable.
So a third site at Fort Drum has real value in terms of national security—which is precisely what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley said in testimony before Congress last year.
If Donald Trump is reelected to the presidency in November, this would be a good place to start in demonstrating why his approach to defense is different from that of his predecessor.
Disclosure: Several companies that might have an interest in the third site contribute to my think tank, the Lexington Institute.
