This is the first development of a long research agenda into nuclear weapons doctrine.

It does not make for good cocktail discussion, although that is actually dangerous.

Why?

War is the continuation of politics by other means, hopefully never nuclear in character.

Nonetheless, the existence of nuclear weapons means that there is no more important doctrine than nuclear doctrine, and every citizen needs to understand it with open eyes.

This is particularly the case because the theory of nuclear war is so far thankfully all simulations, save Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because it is the peculiar character of nuclear weapons that you have them to prevent other people from using them on you as the first priority.

Having said that, nonetheless, a careful persusal of the Great Powers nuclear doctrines and crisis history reveals that in fact, human nature being what it is, the Great Powers use their nuclear weapons to pursue what they perceive as their national interests beyond mere survival with nuclear weapons, especially by extending deterrence to allies.

Therein lies the rub, because for example, once the Soviet Union acquired nuclear weapons, thanks to traitors like Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg among others in Canada and the United Kingdom, no offense, it was always hard to convince the Europeans in general that when push came to shove, we would really trade New York to defend Hamburg.

Thus, the United States felt compelled, even with the Eisenhower's New Look strategy of "massive retaliation," to deploy significant conventionally armed forces to create American hostages in effect, so-called tripwires, thereby demonstrating a reason to risk a nuclear war with the Soviet Union in defense of Western Europe, Japan, and later South Korea.

Nonetheless, because of their longstanding imperial ambitions, first the British and then the French felt compelled to acquire nuclear weapons, even with the U.S. NATO guarantee.

These British and French arsenals are not trivial in character, as witnessed by the Soviet insistence that, in addition to the Chinese arsennal, they be counted in SALT talks in order to compensate the Russian arsenal viz the American arsenal in terms of size.

That is a demonstration that in fact, whatever the publicly stated purpose, part of the functionality of the British and French arsenal was to serve as an interpoise betweent the United States and Russia, just as the de-nuclearization of Germany points to the same end, namely in conjunction, an option value in which France and Britain resume full independence as Great Powers in de facto alliance with Russia against Germany, should the case ever present itself when that seemed the power maximizing thing to do.

That of course would mean one would want to keep an eye on the arsenals of our allies at some level.

As to nuclear doctrine, there has been a disconcerting disconnect from the military and civilian worlds since the end of the Cold War in the case of the United States.

Where have all the Wohlstetters gone, the civilians at RAND who created U.S. nuclear doctrine?

The answer is that the academy has fads too, where the grants are usually, and that the moment of U.S. hegemony made nuclear proliferation the focus of the academy.

Now, there is a relationship between proliferation and Great Power nuclear doctrine, in that when there is proliferation, that makes extending deterrence to say Germany or Japan much more problematic for the United States.

Whatever Waltz said about a totally nuclear world being a safer one does not in practice seem to be the case, possibly because under the surface the Powers are afraid of a correlated error in calculation like 1914.

This extension of deterrence to allies and the pursuit of power at non-zero risk of deterrence failure would imply for starters that should deterrence ever begin to fail, one method of demonstrating resolve would be for the protectee to allow the protector to test a weapon in its airspace in a visible fashion, to reveal the information that the protecting party will in fact use nuclear weapons in defense of its ally.

That signal would of course be far more credible should the defending party simultaneously detonate a weapon on its own territory, in a demonstration of resolve.

Here, one might also expect attacking parties in the event of deterrence failure to attack themselves, in order to demonstrate resolve to say overturn the balance of power, by then in conjunction with the other powers issuing an ultimatum.

That would imply the United States would be better off with the Tridents able to fire after five days say of no communication, or with the opportunity to re-establsh VLF communications with the National Command Authority to conduct offensive nuclear operations for favorable war termination, like prestige objects of an aristocracy say, or culture with the French, or oil with the Russians.

Having said all this, the point of nuclear weapons doctrine must of course be grounded in war prevention or termination on least cost grounds; one never wants to have to do this, which is why sometimes we don't like to think about it very much.

Personally, I hope the above discussion always remains hypothetical in character, forever and ever.

One final note.

U.S. and Russian doctrine have adopted a dangerous habit of using ambiguity to maximize deterrent effect.

The logic of this is that by maintaining ambiguity, one keeps the adversary uncertain.

The reason I think that this is a bad idea has a one word example: Poland.

If the Russians make an error in estimating U.S. resolve or Poland, or, what I think is more likely, that everyone knows that the extension of deterrence and NATO to Poland the and Baltic states was dumb, then the U.S. ought to re-think their status in terms of Finland, so that the United States and Russia do not ever miscommunicate in a nuclear signaling game, which of course some of the other Powers might, under certain circumstances, be willing to try to create.

More thoughts on this topic later.