America’s Nuclear Zeitenwende
By Charles Ball
May 16, 2024
U.S. Air Force
Overshadowed by Hamas’s attack on Israel, the release of the congressionally mandated Strategic Posture Commission (SPC) report heralded the arrival of an American nuclear Zeitenwende – a sea change setting us on a new course. By issuing consensus recommendations for significant changes to the size and composition of the deployed nuclear forces of the United States, the bi-partisan members of the SPC signaled that we have crossed the Rubicon from the post-Cold war nuclear order to the terra incognita of two peer nuclear adversaries’ intent on brandishing their growing nuclear weapons capabilities to overthrow the rules-based international order. The SPC commissioners warn that this “new global environment is fundamentally different than anything experienced in the past,” constituting “an existential challenge for which the United States is ill prepared, unless its leaders make decisions now to adjust the U.S. strategic posture.”
It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the SPC’s consensus conclusions have reoriented the nuclear debate, shifting the focus away from how to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. strategy and towards a focus on how to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in the strategies of our adversaries (by building a nuclear posture that will credibly deter them). In doing so on a bi-partisan basis and by articulating comprehensive recommendations to address “this unprecedented two peer threat,” the SPC commissioners can legitimately lay claim to having produced the most important national security document of the post-Cold war era.
Nevertheless, the SPC’s recommendations have not received the widespread, public attention that they urgently require. This inattention needs to be quickly remedied, lest we fail to garner the essential public support necessary to ensure the United States creates a strategic posture capable of preventing great power military conflict.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/05/16/americas_nuclear_zeitenwende_1031913.html
