{"id":42851,"date":"2018-03-29T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-29T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/uncategorized\/2018\/03\/29\/what-arms-race\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T23:33:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T23:33:33","slug":"what-arms-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/space\/2018\/03\/29\/what-arms-race\/","title":{"rendered":"A US-Russia nuclear arms race? Where?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Albert Einstein once quipped that \u201cpolitics is more difficult than physics,\u201d and after a most distinguished career commenting on both topics, he would know. As a prominent but ultimately unsuccessful activist against the United States building nuclear weapons<\/a> after World War II, Einstein found it much easier to sway scientists than the American public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is in part because scientists like to work within the confines of well-defined laws of nature where something can be proven or disproven. Yet, the scientist\u2019s Enlightenment era-inspired desire to produce cause-and-effect models is inherently limited to inanimate objects; good scientists say as much. Planets are simply easier to predict than people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But some of the more zealous scientists and their activist supporters claim with academic-like certainty that human behavior, and specifically decision-making, can be properly modeled with confidence even in extremely complicated environments like international relations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, many nuclear disarmament proponents take language from Isaac Newton\u2019s third law of thermodynamics \u2014 for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction \u2014 and apply it to U.S. nuclear weapons<\/a>. During the Cold War, nearly every U.S. proposal to build a new nuclear warhead or delivery system was met with claims that it would only provoke a similar action by the Soviet Union, providing further fuel to the arms race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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U.S. President Ronald Reagan, left, with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Dec. 8,1987, during welcoming ceremonies at the White House on the first day of their disarmament summit. (Jerome Delay\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Much to the disarmers\u2019 chagrin, however, studies in<\/a> and out of government<\/a> showed that the U.S. and Soviet leadership rarely, if ever, developed and deployed a nuclear weapon system only because the other side had it. Instead, leaders weighed a number of factors such as domestic political support, budget commitments, arms control priorities, allied support, development time, deterrent effect and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dynamic was perfectly summarized by U.S. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown\u2019s famous quip about the Soviets: When we build, they build. When we cut, they build.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This reality has only come into starker contrast within the last month as the newly published U.S. Nuclear Posture Review<\/a> revealed \u201cRussia is modernizing an active stockpile of up to 2,000 non-strategic nuclear weapons\u201d including short-range ballistic missiles, depth charges, anti-ship missiles and anti-submarine torpedoes. The United States got rid of all such systems before or at the end of the Cold War, including the anti-submarine torpedoes, which U.S. submariners joked had a kill probability of two \u2014 the target and them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the Russians are apparently modernizing these battlefield nuclear weapons, nobody in the U.S. is scrambling to put an atomic warhead on everything, striking another blow to the action-reaction model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Faced with a nonexistent quantitative arms race, disarmament activists<\/a> and even former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who incidentally helped develop the technological superiority that the United States enjoys today, now warn<\/a> of a qualitative arms race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the U.S. makes better nuclear weapons or more effective missile defenses, so the thinking goes, the Russians will just make better penetrating missiles in response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n