Nuclear weapons were essential to maintaining international security during the Cold War because they were a means of deterrence. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage -to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world. The Wall Street Journal JanuNuclear weapons today present tremendous dangers, but also an historic opportunity. Appendices provide supplemental information about the work of the Commission. The report closes with some observations about the nature of the consensus achieved by the Commission. Chapter 10 addresses additional preventive and protection measures. This section includes a separate discussion of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. national objectives, including arms control and nonproliferation. Chapters 7 through 9 address different aspects of the political strategy supporting U.S. strategic posture, including the nuclear force structure, missile defense, declaratory policy, the stockpile of nuclear weapons, and the weapons complex. Chapters 2 through 6 address different aspects of the U.S. The remainder of the report elaborates how this should be accomplished in the years ahead. A balanced approach is needed, one that integrates military and political instruments of national power in a comprehensive approach to meet and reduce nuclear dangers. policy and strategy must be tailored to the specific challenges and opportunities of the current period. A key argument developed here is that this environment has evolved in distinct phases, each with its own set of challenges and opportunities. Chapter 1 describes how that environment has evolved over recent decades and highlights the key factors in the current environment that should inform U.S. It begins with a review of the security environment. Congress then appointed a 12-person bipartisan group to conduct this review. We recommend that the new administration scrap the New Triad, divorce nuclear and conventional deterrence, and reserve nuclear weapons for deterring extreme threats and responding to extreme attacks from nuclear states for which no lesser military capabilities suffice.Ĭongress authorized the formation of a commission to conduct a review of the strategic posture of the United States and to make recommendations on how to move forward. Thus, it lacks the intellectual coherence necessary to communicate nuclear policy to the public and to Congress. The vertices of the New Triad appear to represent little more than institutional interests intent on staking out equity, with the primary purpose of promoting the acquisition of controversial capabilities-missile defenses, conventional global strike, new nuclear warheads-rather than comprising the well-thought-out complementary components of an integrated system. Its fatal flaw is the commingling of nuclear and conventional weapons, which lowers the nuclear threshold and undermines deterrence and stability. The New Triad, the Department of Defense's conceptual structure for strategic capabilities, is an impediment to clear thinking, communication, and consensus regarding nuclear issues.
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