Nuclear Fearmongering Doesn't Work

We can argue about why, but it's not swaying Congress

Let me start off with saying that I enjoy the nuclear weapons research conducted by the Federation of American Scientists. If you want some hard facts on the nine nations who have developed nuclear weapons, this is the place to go.¹ Lately, the FAS group has been working on an op-ed series in the Washington Post in which they are trying to “raise the nuclear I.Q.” of the public. To which I say, gods bless and good luck with that. We need to have a public that is better informed on this important issue. Hell, we need a national security enterprise that is better informed on nukes.

That said, I was not a fan of the latest opinion piece by Mackenzie Knight-Boyle, a senior research associate at FAS, titled “How a Nuclear Attack on the U.S. Might Unfold, Step by Step.” It reminds me a lot of Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” and I mean that I don’t like the fantasy aspect of it at all.² At least it is Russia or China that is launching the full-scale nuclear attack and not North Korea. Correction, she says it could be North Korea “in the not-too-distant future.” The sequence of events runs like this:

• There’s a “barrage of missiles carrying nuclear warheads at the United States.” Satellite and ground system radars detect the launch, and the U.S. military headquarters are alerted. No adversary named, because why should that matter.

• POTUS is notified five minutes after launch, and they open the “nuclear football.” At ten minutes after launch, NORAD confirms that the targets are within the continental United States. Impact is expected in 12-15 minutes.

• POTUS talks to his advisors. The adversarial nation launching the nukes is not picking up the red phone. Indications are that the missiles will target the three massive ICBM fields, Washington DC, and other major command centers.

• At T+18 minutes, POTUS makes the call to launch 300 ICBMs (not 400??), scramble the bombers (he waited until now?), and “ready the submarines for launch.” At T+20, the US ICBMs are launched against enemy military bases and political centers of power.

• Within T+30, the enemy ICBMs hit the (mostly) empty silo fields, Washington DC, and several high-value targets in Maryland and Virginia. Now we get the usual “here’s how horrible a nuclear strike would be” commentary.

You all should know the usual description of a nuclear strike. First “a fireball hotter than the surface of the sun” vaporizes everything within several hundred meters of the blast site. The flash from the nukes blinds a good number of people for miles and causes second and third-degree burns to many. The blast wave knocks down scores of buildings and breaks windows for miles around. The fallout from the multiple nuclear blasts around Washington DC flows over Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. The article includes hazard prediction charts, but not for the Midwest that also got clobbered.³ Then the U.S. missiles land on the offending country and more destruction mounts.

Less than an hour after the adversary missiles took off, U.S. ICBMs begin to land in response, and countless more people are killed.

A full-scale attack between any major nuclear players would kill millions of people and contaminate large swaths of the planet with radiation. Nuclear winter, in which smoke and soot from the bombs block sunlight from reaching Earth, could well follow.

I have a number of issues. First of all, why did this adversarial nation decide to just use ICBMs in the attack and not cruise missiles launched from submarines or strategic bombers? Those cruise missiles would hit in far less than 30 minutes. Were they being saved for a second-strike threat against the U.S. retaliation? The author says, “the enemy missiles are probably targeting the three ICBM silo fields … to prevent a massive retaliatory attack from the United States.” Two questions, why would China or Russia decide to use such a massive strike against the missile fields when certainly they know that the U.S. military has its nuclear submarines at sea that offer an “assured second strike”? And because of the POTUS decision to launch under attack, none of the adversary’s ICBMs prevented that “massive retaliatory strike.”⁴ It seems contrary to any rational design. I submit that both Russia and China have differing concepts of strategic deterrence than the United States, but these fundamental policy issues relating to “first-strike stability” and “mutually assured destruction” are well known. They remain rational actors in the sense of the term (so is Iran, but we can’t talk about that). None of this scenario makes any sense, even as a hypothetical to explain how the U.S. nuclear decision-making goes.

A nuclear attack is bad, okay? But seriously, is there anyone who thinks otherwise? More importantly, is it FAS’s position that by scaring the public into a worst-case scenario of a strategic nuclear attack, this is going to somehow result in changing how the White House and Congress view strategic nuclear weapons? I submit that it will not, in fact, change any politician’s point of view from what they hold right now.

There is an interesting public poll conducted by YouGov last year. I don’t know how well it represents the public’s views but let’s look at the poll nonetheless. It suggests that about half of the American public believes that no nation should have nuclear weapons, and that the United States should disarm its nuclear stockpile but only if every other nation does, too. A majority of the public believes that nuclear weapons make the world unstable, but a third of the public (mostly men) believe that the United States is safer because of nuclear weapons. A good majority of the public does not believe in the United States initiating a first-strike launch, but about the same number support a U.S. retaliatory strike. All of this is pretty much in line with how U.S. political representatives see it. They have no reason to believe that adversarial nations will disarm their nuclear weapons if the United States does so as well.

A 2023 poll by the Chicago Council-Carnegie Corporation has similar results. About half the U.S. public understands the effects of nuclear weapons, and six of ten want to learn more about U.S. nuclear weapons policy. Overwhelmingly, the polled respondents believe that U.S. nuclear weapons make the country safer, although they cannot exactly quantify the benefits or harm of nuclear weapons personally. Two-thirds believe that U.S. nuclear weapons have been effective in preventing conflict between the United States and other countries, citing U.S. nuclear retaliation as a primary reason why. I would argue that these opinions are the ones reflected by most congressional politicians when it comes to reviewing the U.S. nuclear posture. On the one hand, it’s good to see that there’s an appetite for increasing one’s knowledge of nuclear weapons and policy. On the other hand, nearly half the people polled in this survey also believe that the U.S. missile defense capabilities will protect them and their families if a nuclear war occurs. I have some bad news for you people…

I have to admit that I was not aware of the “Russell-Einstein Manifesto” of 1955 in which Bertrand Russell and nine other Nobel Prize Laureates (plus Leopold Infeld who was not a Nobel Prize Laureate) warned about the dangers posed by a global nuclear conflict. Their resolution stated:

We invite this Congress, and through it the scientists of the world and the general public, to subscribe to the following resolution:
"In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the Governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them."

I want to reference this manifesto to merely point out that advocacy groups have been warning about the devastating impact of nuclear weapons for literally seven decades. It still hasn’t taken in the minds of the general public to the point that these views influence Congress to do anything differently. Maybe it was different in the 1970s and 1980s when people were more afraid of the huge number of nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union and the United States were producing and the possibility of an escalating conflict between the two superpowers.

It should not surprise anyone that the Trump administration is increasing funds for the U.S. nuclear enterprise and missile defense. According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, funding for nuclear weapons will rise from $49.2 billion in FY25 to $62 billion in FY26. Correspondingly, DOE spending for nuclear weapons will rise from $19.8 billion to $24.5 billion. Nearly every component of the U.S. nuclear enterprise that is under development will see increases in their funding. This following slide is from the DoD budget materials for FY2026. Congress is going to approve this funding, without question, in part due to a promise made by the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and in part due to the recent drum-beating about China’s growing nuclear arsenal.

Again, I love the FAS scholars. They are good people with a dogged determination to put some transparency on the nine nations’ nuclear weapons stockpiles and their policies. At the same time, this line of attack — illustrating that a full-scale strategic nuclear exchange, a worst-case scenario in any aspect, is not going to make their case for pushing toward nuclear abolition. Nuclear weapons exist. The nations responsible for fielding them are not, in any shape or fashion, going to get rid of them. They interpret the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a confidence-building measure, not as an absolute mandate to get rid of nukes. It doesn’t matter what school of international relations you believe in. The leaders of the nine nations with nuclear weapons have fears about their aggressive neighboring states and the political intentions of superpowers. Nothing is going to supplant these concerns.

There is a better approach than publishing lurid accounts of the devastation that might be caused by a strategic nuclear exchange. I don’t believe the public can grok the impact of such an event. Hell, they have trouble getting their head around how natural disasters wipe out cities and cause thousands of casualties. How are they expected to react to this grisly scenario? It is beyond their capabilities to imagine the destruction and its effect on their lives.⁵ They would rather believe that the U.S. government will protect them from this event ever happening and let it go at that. Instead, we need to understand how political leaders view nuclear weapons as both military and political tools and discuss how political leaders need to be very careful about weakening the firewall between conventional and nuclear conflict. We need to call out those political leaders’ demagogy when they trumpet the need for more nukes and we ought to call out the military’s over-classification of Cold War nuclear secrets.

I’d like to see the Democratic party adopt a more constrained platform on nuclear weapons in which they support modernization as well as arms control but eschew nuclear superiority. There is no need to match the combined numbers of Russia and China in some vain hope that this status would somehow rattle Russia and China. I would love to see the Dems firmly adopt a “no first use” policy and state that the United States would only use nuclear weapons in retaliation to an adversary’s use of nuclear weapons, whether against the U.S. homeland or a U.S. partner or ally. Unfortunately, they often lack the courage behind their convictions to do so. I would like to see a return to bilateral arms control talks or at least mutual security discussions between Russia, China, the United States, France, and United Kingdom. I believe a think tank such as CSIS, CNAS, the Brookings Institute, the Quincy Institute, or the like, ought to encourage a discussion with political and military leaders on how nation-states develop nuclear postures and the need to facilitate security discussions between nuclear-weapon states to increase strategic stability. These are not hard asks.

I should acknowledge that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace does a great job with its annual nuclear policy conference. More of this, please, and publicize it better. We ought to work on improving the state of knowledge of both the general public and the legislators with the goal of providing them actionable goals that will reduce the danger of nuclear conflict while not completely disarming the nation of its nuclear weapons. This means no more talk about nuclear superiority, no more ideas about MIRVing ICBMs or building mobile ICBMs, no more tactical nukes on submarines or deployed in Europe or Asia for that matter, no more “conventional-nuclear integration” in war plans, no doubling the size of the proposed B-21 bomber fleet (yes, these are all proposals from the advocates for an increased U.S. nuclear enterprise). It also means getting rid of “Golden Dome,” but we’ll have to wait for the U.S. government to come to its senses on the outrageous costs and reduced global security that a national missile defense program causes.

Will the general public increase their nuclear IQ as a result of these actions? Maybe. Probably not. I think it depends on how sincerely the non-nuclear advocates try to reach out to the general public to offer this information and whether Congress responds to the public’s concern about their future.⁶ It’s better than wasting ink and time on colorful yet horrific descriptions of a nuclear holocaust.

1. I cannot confirm nor deny the FAS information on aspects of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. Don’t @ me.

2. I really, really dislike the book “Nuclear War: A Scenario.” It’s a ridiculous scenario guided by “experts” that Jacobsen used to craft a fictional story based on her interviews with questionable people that to my knowledge, hasn’t moved the discussion at all.

3. You can go to this Scientific American article to see the hazard prediction for the Western nuclear hits. Usual stuff, covers the whole country, yadda yadda.

4. I will point out, as I have in other fora, that POTUS always has the option to “ride out” the initial nuclear strike, particularly if it is an incoming ICBM-only attack and there is some doubt as to the numbers and targets of those incoming missiles. The go-to response by most arms control advocates is that POTUS will always launch early because the U.S. authorities are afraid of “losing” their missiles. THAT’S EXACTLY WHY WE CALL THE US MISSILE FIELDS A MISSILE SPONGE. That’s the entire point — to deter an adversary from launching such a massive attack in the first place, and to provide a quick launch if POTUS deems it necessary.

5. Tom Nichols suggests it’s because today’s generations haven’t seen the 1960s-1980s movies that included a nuclear theme (e.g., “On the Beach,” “Dr Strangelove,” “Fail Safe,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Thunderball,” “Threads,” “Seven Days in May,” “The Day After,” “WarGames”)

6. I will acknowledge that there’s lots of basic discussions about nuclear weapons/deterrence on YouTube and many are quite good. How do we get these into the general public’s view? Could there be a grassroots movement against nuclear weapons?