Why is the Nuclear Triad needed if nuclear subs can’t be realistically countered?
In: Technology
I’m reading Arsenals of Folly by Richard Rhodes, who also wrote Making of the Atomic Bomb. A major theme of this book is that the nuclear arms race is not necessarily rational and a lot of public-facing justification shouldn’t be taken at face value.
Nuclear weapons were initially only able to be used by the Air Force. The Air Force “owned” nuclear weapons until smaller warheads became available and the navy and army started adopting them. Inter-service rivalry was strong in the Cold War, and the idea of a triad was largely a navy justification for their mission and budget.
There isn’t anything innately magical or logical about three delivery mechanisms. Indeed, battleships and infantry-carried “mines” could be used to deliver sizable nukes, so “triad” was an oversimplification anyways. One, two, or a hundred independent ways to nuke someone might be sensible, depending on what you’re trying to do.
Subs are hard to detect compared to ICBMs and hard to destroy compared to bombers. Initially their missiles weren’t accurate enough to reliably destroy armored missile silos, so they were envisioned as a “second-strike” weapon, to be used against cities if your enemy shot their missiles at you. This is a fairly clever role, as the mass slaughter of civilians goes, because if the subs are undetected then starting a nuclear war *is* suicide. Subs are an excellent guaranteed of MAD.
Things are unfortunately changing. New guidance and fusing is challenging the idea that sub-launched missiles can’t be used preemptively against missile silos. With relatively shorter ranges and correspondingly shorter warning times, subs may become a credible “first strike” weapon, potentially able to destroy enemy nukes if fired without warning in a surprise attack. Taking that to its logical conclusion, ICBMs become potentially irrelevant and MAD weakened, and the prospect of preemptive nuclear war may become tempting.
Air defense is much more sophisticated than it has been in the past, so bombers are a suspect leg of the triad. Today, a survey of nuclear arms might show ICBMs, mobile-launched missiles, sub-launched missiles, and bomber-launched cruise missiles as a more up-to-date nuclear arsenal, with ICBMs being potentially the most vulnerable leg.
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