The Limits of Damage Limitation

To the Editors (Matthew Kroenig writes):

In “Should the United States Reject MAD?” Charles Glaser and Steve Fetter argue that the United States should forgo a damage-limitation capability against China’s strategic forces.¹ To arrive at this conclusion, however, they underestimate the advantages of a damage-limitation strategy and do not even consider more feasible and desirable policy options for a strategic equilibrium with China. When these steps are corrected, it becomes clear that the United States should not forgo this capability. Rather, it should preserve its damage-limitation capability and quantitative nuclear superiority over China, while accepting the inevitability of China’s possession of an assured nuclear retaliatory capability.

Glaser and Fetter begin by making the conceptual mistake of searching for an arbitrary threshold for meaningful damage limitation. In doing so, they underestimate the value of limiting damage in the event of nuclear war. Glaser and Fetter are correct that completely denying China’s nuclear deterrent is increasingly difficult if not impossible as China expands and modernizes its arsenal, but this is an unnecessarily high bar. Damage limitation is better conceived of as a continuous, not a binary, variable. There is no magical threshold beyond which the ability to limit damage in a nuclear war ceases to matter. Any U.S. president would want to protect as much of the country as possible in the event of a nuclear exchange, and any damage-limitation capability (even far below the threshold set by Glaser and Fetter) would therefore be valuable. To argue otherwise, one would have to argue that saving millions of American lives is unimportant or politically irrelevant, which is an untenable position.

Glaser and Fetter’s second error is to misconceive of nuclear deterrence in the wake of the nuclear revolution and overlook recent scholarly research. As a result, they underestimate how damage limitation enhances deterrence and extended deterrence. Theories of the nuclear revolution (including those Glaser helped develop) suggest that political conflicts of interest among nuclear powers are best conceived of as games of nuclear brinkmanship.² To deter nuclear war, therefore, a central question is: What causes states to back down in these “competitions in risk taking.”³ As recent research shows, nuclear superiority and associated degrees of vulnerability to nuclear war affect the balance of resolve, even when both sides possess an assured retaliation capability.⁴ China will be less likely to challenge the United States and its allies, and to achieve coercive success against them, therefore, if the United States maintains a damage-limitation capability. In other words, a U.S. damage-limitation capability bolsters deterrence and extended deterrence.

Scholars have questioned whether this logic also applies to nuclear compellence, but recent research shows that it does.⁵ A nuclear-armed state has never issued a militarized compellent threat against a nuclear superior state. In other words, nuclear superiority deters compellent threats.

More broadly, order in the Asia Pacific has for decades rested on U.S. primacy. And as international relations theory suggests, rapid shifts in the balance of power, such as that which would occur if the United States abandoned nuclear advantages over China, would be destabilizing.⁶ Preserving stability in Asia through the continued maintenance of U.S. predominance is a far better option.

Glaser and Fetter rightly fear the possibility of a costly arms race and deteriorating relations with China if the United States attempts the near-impossible task of seeking to deny China’s nuclear deterrent altogether. There is a much better solution, however, than voluntarily shedding an important means of protecting the United States and its allies: accept that China will likely possess some minimal retaliatory capability regardless of the steps taken by Washington, while the United States continues to maintain quantitative superiority, including a damage-limitation capability. This arrangement (also advanced by former Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and Michael O’Hanlon) has been warmly received in my many meetings with Chinese interlocutors in track II dialogues in Beijing and in Washington over the past two years.⁷ The Chinese would be comforted in knowing that their country possesses a secure...