Recalling Nagasaki and the likely next use of nuclear weapons in war

Given the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki being commemorated today and given the nuclear brinkmanship going on between North Korea and the United States, I thought I would weigh in here with some thoughts about when nuclear weapons will next be used in war.

The short answer is: I think it will be soon, and I think that the U.S., the only country in the world to use nuclear weapons in war, will be continuing its streak.

Although this matter has something to do with Donald Trump, it has more to do with American nuclear policy that’s been in place for decades, a policy that has largely been ignored by the American people. To put it bluntly, the United States has never forsworn first use of nuclear weapons.

Indeed, in the immediate post-war years, our readiness to use nuclear weapons against Soviet forces to stop an invasion of Western Europe was seen as “defense on the cheap,” allowing a demobilizing of U.S. service men and women stationed there at the time. Reserving the right to use nuclear arms for tactical purposes — that is against military forces and their command and control structure — has been part of U.S. defense planning ever since.

Contrary to popular thinking, as the ability to accurately deliver nuclear weapons improved in the 1970s, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union backed off from the “strategic” targeting of cities and infrastructure in favor of “counterforce” targeting of each others military capabilities, in particular the other guy’s ballistic missile launch sites. In spite of this kind of strategic fine-tuning, a nuclear exchange between the then superpowers would have resulted in millions of civilian casualties.

Concurrent with the development of accurate delivery systems was the development of more controllable nuclear weapons. These “designer nukes,” as they were called, possessed not larger, but surprisingly, less destructive warheads. Some even had “dialable” yields, while others had explosive characteristics that maximized effects, say, on the occupants of armored vehicles will minimizing the blast that would demolish and set fire to nearby cities.

Jimmy Carter fell political victim to these kind of nuclear innovations by advocating for the development of a neutron bomb with the above characteristics. Americans along with the rest of the world were aghast; they had become comfortable with living in a world where multi-megaton nuclear weapons were poised to incinerate cities, but railed against their low-yield versions being used to annihilate Soviet tank crews.

In part, this revulsion was understandable, since any use of so-called tactical nukes made nuclear war that much more thinkable. And there were, and remain, concerns that such a limited scale nuclear conflict would spin rapidly out of control. But whatever the public backlash against Carter and his neutron bomb proposal was, the development of tactical nukes continued apace. If Americans were genuinely opposed to these kind of things, then their elected representatives never got the memo.

Since the 1970s, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent refining these weapons and the systems, such as cruise missiles, that can deliver them to within a few meters of their intended targets. Using this kind of destructive force at such close range might seem to be overkill, but when the intended target is encased in reinforced concrete and buried deep underground, a couple of thousand pounds of conventional explosives just won’t do. And a low-yield nuclear warhead — only a few percent of the explosive power of the Nagasaki bomb — may be just what you need to to the job done while minimizing fallout and collateral damage that would otherwise make a larger nuclear explosive an unsuitable weapon.

Fast forward a couple of decades to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was a textbook military case calling for a decapitation strike, meaning a way of trying to end a war quickly by killing the people at the top of the chain of command and interfering with their ability to communicate with and control their troops in the field. The U.S. was reminded, as it had learned during its earlier attempts to target Al-Qaeda in the caves of Tora Bora in Afghanistan, that conventional bunker-busting munitions were not an effective solution to their tactical problem.

Although I imagine George W. Bush may have had low-yield nukes available to take out Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi leadership in the opening salvos of that misguided war, the U.S. at the time was operating under a regimen of self-deterrence that made first use of nuclear weapons politically unacceptable. If the idea was discussed behind closed doors, and I suspect it was, it never saw the light of day.

Enter Donald Trump.

Although presidential candidate Trump was pilloried for asking this question about nuclear weapons, “if we have them, why can’t we use them,” in August 2016, no presidential contender from either major party, including Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, ever said that they would renounce the first use of nuclear weapons as president or drew any attention to the possibility of eliminating tactical nukes from our arsenal as a matter of policy. Trump’s question, although likely born of ignorance, was one that the American people didn’t want to hear, even as they continued offer bipartisan support for construction and deployment of the very weapons whose use many of them deplored.

What has changed with Donald Trump is not U.S. policy concerning the first use of nuclear weapons, but the willingness of the president to ignore the political blowback that will inevitably occur if the country crosses the nuclear threshold for the first time since August 9, 1945.

Frankly, my dear, I don’t think that Trump gives a damn about international opinion. And, like it or not, the current crisis with North Korea may provide the perfect tactical reason to violate what has been an international norm for more than seventy years.

Hostilities with North Korea, if they begin, will more than likely begin with their launch of an artillery attack on military targets around Seoul which is estimated to result in 60,000 fatalities only after the first few hours. Some studies project more than 300,000 civilian dead in the opening days of such a conflict.

One way to cut this massacre short would be to try eliminate Kim Jong-un and the political and military leadership of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as soon as possible after the onset of hostilities, if not earlier. Given the decades that the North Korean leaders have had to develop highly protected underground bunkers, as Saddam did, it’s not at all clear that conventional U.S. weapons will be able to accomplish this goal. If push comes to shove, the United States military will offer bunker-busting weapons equipped with sub-kiloton nuclear warheads to do the job, and Donald Trump will enthusiastically order their use.

I, for one, hope that it doesn’t come to this; if cooler heads prevail — a big “if” with this administration — the U.S. will back away from the precipice by declaring that it has no goal of regime-change in North Korea and thereafter will enter into negotiations with all parties in the region involved in order to define new security arrangements for the peninsula, including the possibility of a drawdown of U.S. forces in exchange for a verifiable reduction in North Korea’s nuclear and missile program.

But, barring diplomatic success, if nuclear weapons are once again visited upon the world in war for the first time since Nagasaki, it won’t just be Donald Trump who is to blame. It will also be the American people who, through their duly-elected representatives and taxes have, for decades, endorsed a first-use nuclear policy and fostered the development of tactical nuclear weapons to be used in exactly this way, all the while turning a blind eye.