Rethinking the Unthinkable: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategic Insolvency

In an era of revived great power competition and rapid technological change, the legacy nuclear weapons doctrine of the United States needs to be reconsidered. The fact that neither the United States nor any other country has used nuclear weapons since 1945 suggests that they are effectively useless as instruments of war or diplomacy. But for eight tenths of a century, the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal has successfully served a domestic political purpose: disguising the strategic insolvency of American strategy. This insolvency arises from the gap between America’s geopolitical commitments and its lack of the conventional military forces and national manufacturing base necessary to uphold such commitments in a sustained great power conflict.

In the eighty years since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, no other nuclear weapons have ever been used, although great numbers have been stockpiled by the major nuclear powers—the United States, the Soviet Union/Russia, and China—as well as by Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Why nuclear weapons have not been used in all this time must be explained.

There are two possible explanations. One is that the very lethality of nuclear weapons, by deterring nuclear powers, has ensured that they would not be used. This leads to the conclusion that any nuclear power that unilaterally reduced its nuclear arsenal might make nuclear aggression and nuclear war more likely. The other more plausible explanation is that nuclear weapons have not been used by any state in the last eight decades because they are tactically and strategically useless.¹

Tactical nuclear weapons are designed for use on the battlefield: with low yields and short ranges, these arms are distinguished from long-range, high-yield strategic weapons designed to annihilate targets behind the battle lines in an enemy’s homeland. At various times, tactical nuclear weapons have been produced for battlefield use. Historian Andrew Bacevich provides an amusing account of “battlefield nukes” in The Pentomic Era: The U.S. Army Between Korea and Vietnam (2012).² Tactical nuclear weapons were also incorporated into Warsaw Pact battle plans during the Cold War.³

But if the atomic bombs dropped on Japan are considered strategic weapons, neither the United States nor any other nuclear power has ever used tactical nuclear weapons. General Colin Powell once recalled commissioning a study of tactical nuclear weapons during the Gulf War: “To do serious damage to just one armored division dispersed in the desert would require a considerable number of small tactical nuclear weapons. I showed [this] analysis to [Secretary of Defense Dick] Cheney and then had it destroyed. If I had had any doubts before about the practicality of nukes on the field of battle, this report clinched them.”⁴

Strategy, Tactics, and Deterrence

Strategic weapons, not tactical weapons, are at the center of both national nuclear stockpiles and debates about nuclear weapons policy. Arsenals of strategic nuclear weapons and the vehicles necessary to deliver them to “counterforce targets” (enemy nuclear and conventional weapons, military bases, and infrastructure) or to “countervalue targets” (enemy populations) have been justified on two grounds: deterrence and decisive effect in quickly ending a war.

Deterrence comes in two versions: deterrence of attacks on the nuclear power’s home territory and extended deterrence. The latter is defined as deterring enemy attacks on other nations that are allies or clients of the nuclear power, such as the member states of NATO that fall under America’s “nuclear umbrella.”

It is often stated that both kinds of deterrence worked during the Cold War and the subsequent decades. A common view holds that the existence of nuclear weapons was responsible for the absence of direct conflict among great powers since 1945, apart from minor border clashes between the Soviet Union and China. In particular, conventional military analysts and historians maintain that America’s nuclear arsenal deterred the Soviet Union from bombing the American homeland or attacking Western Europe with nuclear or conventional forces.

It is true that the United States and the Soviet Union did not engage in “World War III” or all-out protracted war between 1945 and 1989. But there is no evidence that either side ever wanted to attack the other’s homeland or invade the territory of the enemy and its allies, and was only prevented from doing so by the prospect of nuclear destruction.

Both sides in the superpower competition had war plans—but the war plans of both sides assumed that the other would start the conflict. And while the Soviets used force in East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia to hold their Eastern European empire together, no evidence has emerged to show that Stalin or his successors were deterred by nuclear weapons from attempting to invade and occupy Western Europe. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union was viewed by many in the United States and Europe not as a cautious and opportunistic power that preferred to expand its influence by subversion and ideological appeal, and only rarely used military force, but as a potentially reckless revisionist regime like Nazi Germany, held back from world conquest only by fleets of B-52s with nuclear payloads. But this rested on misleading historical analogies.

Since 1945, Western hawks have inflated threats by treating the Soviet Union and its Russian successor state as well as the People’s Republic of China as territorially aggressive powers similar to Nazi Germany. But both World Wars were the unique results of the imperialism of Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany. This is known as the Fischer Thesis, after Fritz Fischer’s Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1961).⁵ If the Fischer Thesis is correct, these conflicts were not inevitable, notwithstanding rivalries and arms races among other European powers. Imperial Germany and Nazi Germany were willing to risk war because post–1871 Germany was too small to be a superpower unless it conquered Europe. By contrast, Russia (in its Soviet and contemporary regime forms) and China, along with the United States and India, are already continental or subcontinental countries with large populations and a high degree of self-sufficiency. In 1987, George Kennan wrote: “I have never believed that [the Soviets] have seen it as in their interests to overrun Western Europe militarily, or that they would have launched an attack on that region generally even if the so-called nuclear deterrent had not existed.”⁶

Unlike Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, post-Soviet Russia and post-Maoist China are seeking to secure exclusive military spheres of influence in their own neighborhoods—by dismembering and annexing eastern Ukraine, in the case of Russia—without engaging in larger coercive territorial revisionism. China might invade Taiwan, which it claims as part of its territory, but it is not going to invade Japan, South Korea, or Vietnam in the foreseeable future. Russia might invade one or more Baltic states, as it has invaded Ukraine and Georgia, but it is highly unlikely to invade Finland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Germany, or France, and it is hard to see what it would gain by doing so.

To be sure, even limited military conquest by Russia and China along their borders should be deplored. The fact remains that the United States and its NATO allies did not intervene when Moscow crushed uprisings in its Warsaw Pact sphere of influence during the Cold War. Throughout the course of the conflict in Ukraine, a major proxy war, the United States and its NATO allies have refrained from sending troops and limited their military and economic aid to Ukraine. The mission of deterring Russia and China from limited local revanchism cannot justify the development, much less the use, of the American nuclear arsenal, or massive U.S. naval and air forces, for that matter.

Indeed, the Cuban Missile Crisis, sparked by the Soviet attempt to install nuclear weapons in Cuba, in response to NATO nuclear weapons in Turkey, shows how dangerous it is for great powers to introduce nuclear weapons in the regional spheres of influence of their rivals. But interpreting such local revisionism as a first step toward regional or global conquest, like Hitler’s annexation of Austria or the Sudetenland, is a mistake.

All of this leads to an ironic conclusion: during the Cold War and in the decades since, the United States was bluffing when it threatened the use of nuclear weapons, but the bluff was never called because the supposed threats—a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, the overrunning of much of Asia by communist Chinese armies—were imaginary all along. The competition among the United States, the Soviet Union, and China for influence in the Third World was important, but the prospect of Warsaw Pact tanks rolling through the Fulda Gap to the shores of the English Channel was never likely. Washington stockpiled weapons of nuclear mass destruction to deter a war that Moscow never had any intention of starting, even if nuclear weapons had never been invented. The fact that the Soviet Union, China, and other countries have built up nuclear arsenals as well merely shows that threat inflation is endemic among policymakers and armed forces everywhere.

Adding to doubt about the value of deterrence theory is the fact that the possession of nuclear weapons has not prevented some nuclear powers from being attacked by other countries. Although it was widely believed to have nuclear weapons, Israel was attacked by a coalition of Arab nations in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. And in 1982, Britain’s nuclear forces did not deter Argentina from invading and occupying the Falklands Islands. Both Israel and Britain achieved victory by conventional means without using nuclear weapons.

The situation in which a country responds to nuclear attack solely through conventional weapons has not yet occurred and may never occur. But it is not inconceivable. It is typically assumed that a country that is a victim of a nuclear attack must respond with a tit-for-tat nuclear attack. But why? If the goal is to prevent further nuclear attacks, it might be better to use conventional hypersonic missiles, or drone swarms, or computer viruses that can disable enemy infrastructure and paralyze its command-and-control capabilities. In apocalyptic science fiction movies, all atomic bombs go off automatically whenever one explodes, but in reality, states that have suffered nuclear attacks may have a range of non-nuclear options.

Extended Deterrence: A Hollow Doctrine?

The United States has sought to use its nuclear weapons arsenal to deter attacks, conventional or nuclear, on its allies in Europe and Asia, as well as on the American homeland. This doctrine is known as “extended deterrence.” Throughout the Cold War, the strategy of NATO was to rely on the first use of nuclear weapons to stop an invasion of Germany and Western Europe by the Soviet Union’s conventional forces. An implicit threat of nuclear retaliation also undergirds American extended deterrence in the case of its allies, Japan and South Korea, and its ambiguous protectorate, Taiwan.

In Europe, by the 1960s, the threat of atomic bombardment of the Soviet Union in retaliation for a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe was supplemented by forward-deployed conventional forces, but these were never adequate to overcome Soviet conventional superiority.⁷ During the Nixon years, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger argued that NATO’s conventional forces were “too large to be a tripwire, too small to resist an all-out Soviet assault.”⁸

As a strategy and doctrine, extended deterrence suffers from doubts about its credibility. Will the protective nuclear power really risk all-out nuclear war and the destruction of its homeland to protect an ally? In the 1960s, France concluded that the United States might not do so and acquired its own independent nuclear arsenal. That the doubts of America’s allies were reasonable is suggested by the fact that during the Cold War, they often reacted with alarm to American pressure to build up European conventional defenses, instead of a modest tripwire force. Not without reason, some in Europe feared that the United States and the Soviet Union would agree not to strike each other’s homelands, while fighting a limited conventional war that could demolish central Europe.

When we turn from the maintenance of nuclear weapons for deterrence to claims of their decisive effect in ending a great power war, we find an even greater lack of realism. Between World War II and the present, it has often been claimed that the existence of nuclear weapons means that there will never be years-long conventional wars among great powers again. A variant of this statement has become a cliché: “The next World War will be over in a few hours or a few days.”

It is important to note that the same prediction was made before the World Wars in the early 1900s by strategists and publicists who predicted that non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction, delivered by air forces to annihilate foreign armies, arsenals, or cities, would quickly end “the next war.” In The Command of the Air (1921), General Giulio Douhet, the Italian prophet of air power, claimed that what would nowadays be called strategic bombing could wipe out the enemy quickly: “Within a few minutes some 20 tons of high-explosive, incendiary, and gas bombs would rain down. First would come explosives, then fires, then deadly gases floating on the surface and preventing any approach to the stricken area.”⁹

With one possible exception, the theory of decisive air power in a great power conflict was refuted by experience in both World Wars. Air power was important in those conflicts as a supplement to, not a substitute for, conventional war.

The one possible exception involves the role of the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in bringing about the surrender of Imperial Japan—and an end to World War II. Scholars continue to debate whether the two atomic bombs were the decisive factor, or whether the declaration of war against Japan by the Soviet Union, conventional bombing, or other factors, alone or in combination, brought about the result.¹⁰ A similar debate continues about whether the end of the Kosovo War in 1999 was purely the result of NATO air power or was caused by air power in combination with Russia’s lack of support for Serbia, the threat of a ground invasion, and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).¹¹

In spite of the fact that the strategy of decisive air power, apart from the possible example of Japan, had little to support it following World War II, the United States made this early-twentieth century doctrine, with nuclear weapons replacing Douhet’s poison gas, the basis for its own homeland defense and that of Europe from 1945 to this day. The reason is clear: beginning with the Truman and Eisenhower years, Congress and the American public have been consistently unwilling to spend the money needed for the conventional forces in being that could fulfill America’s military commitments in Europe and East Asia in the event of a major conflict—without the need to use nuclear weapons.

In the years after World War II, popular war weariness led to rapid demobilization of the U.S. armed forces. Between 1945 and 1947, the number of men in America’s armed forces plummeted from eight million to 684,000.¹² The Truman administration’s proposal to supplement postwar skeleton armed forces with a system of universal military training (UMT) was dismissed as too expensive and intrusive by Congress, in favor of the less costly Selective Service draft lottery. U.S. military spending and defense production during the Cold War peaked at around 14 percent of GDP during the Korean War and around 9 percent during the Vietnam War.¹³ During the Korean War, Congress provided the president with the authority to mobilize the economy in the Defense Production Act, but there was no large-scale industrial mobilization or rationing during either the Korean or Vietnam wars. In 1973, Congress abolished the draft.

By the 1970s, the federal government abandoned civil defense efforts like air raid drills and the construction of bomb shelters. The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) became the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), focused on natural disasters. Stockpiles of critical materials were sold off after the Cold War. The remaining stockpiles today have one-fortieth of their value in 1952.¹⁴

The erosion of the ability of the United States to mobilize for a protracted non-nuclear conflict continued during the arms buildup of the Reagan years. In 2020, a review of the history of U.S. industrial preparedness observed the reluctance of Washington in making the arrangements necessary for industrial mobilization:

In theory, the Reagan national security strategy required preparation for a global war that would require sustained mobilization, but the administration took few actions to implement such a policy. For example, there was no creation of standby industrial capacity. The administration’s most visible policies, such as nuclear modernization, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and naval force expansion, had priority over an industrial mobilization.¹⁵

Following the Cold War, the U.S. government downsized the military. During the demobilization that followed World War I, the government put in place strategies for industrial mobilization. The National Defense Act of 1920 was followed in 1924 by the Industrial Mobilization Basic Plan, the first of a series of plans up to 1939.¹⁶ In contrast, from the fall of the Berlin Wall until the 2020s, policymakers of both parties assumed that the United States would no longer fight protracted conventional great power wars and needed forces only for fighting weak “rogue states” like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and undertaking counterinsurgency operations like those in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

When the Cold War ended in 1989, the defense share of GDP was around 6 percent. In 2025, the defense share of U.S. GDP is less than 3 percent. Following the Cold War, administrations of both parties allowed the offshoring of much of the U.S. manufacturing base to the point that the kind of conversion of civilian to military production typical of American wars up until World War II is no longer possible. This is largely because many critical supply chains are located on the other side of the world—including in China, America’s strategic rival and peer competitor.

The Miserly Hegemon

The conclusion that must be drawn from these trends is striking and sobering. In the eight decades since 1945, nuclear weapons have enabled the United States to adopt a strategy that the late political scientist David Calleo called “hegemony on the cheap.”¹⁷ With its superior economic resources, the United States alone, even without its NATO allies, had the potential to overmatch Warsaw Pact conventional forces in Europe from the beginning of the Cold War to the end. Instead of planning around how to apply American economic strength to winning the next war, however, U.S. policymakers have relied on an implicit first use nuclear strategy in the European and Asian theaters because that was cheaper than large-scale industrial mobilization and less of a threat to civil liberties than a full-scale draft.

In 2015, writing for the Lexington Institute, a defense-contractor-funded think tank, in an essay entitled “Nuclear Weapons Enable Peace,” Constance Baroudas touted the cheapness of nuclear weapons, while hyping threats: “Contrary to some media reports . . . nuclear weapons are an affordable deterrent. The nuclear triad accounts for less than 2 percent of the total defense budget and protects economic centers like New York and Los Angeles from blackmail and complete destruction.”¹⁸

Reliance on relatively inexpensive nuclear weapons as opposed to conventional forces and an adequate national civilian manufacturing base that can be mobilized for military purposes saves money at the expense of insolvency in national strategy. The concept of the “Lippmann gap” is inspired by the observation of Walter Lippmann in 1943: “Foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.”¹⁹ For eighty years, nuclear weapons have been used to patch the gap between America’s foreign commitments and its actual military-industrial power.

A 1986 study for the U.S. Army War College concluded: “The current industrial base is unbalanced and incapable of surging production rates in a timely manner; the base has become increasingly dependent on foreign sources of supply for critical components; productivity growth rates for U.S. defense manufacturing are among the lowest in the free world; and there are no current programs to address the efficient use of industrial resources.”²⁰ Nearly half a century later, the situation is even worse, with the U.S. industrial base far more depleted and the U.S. military even more dependent on foreign sources of supply than it was in the Reagan years.

Closing the Lippmann gap while recognizing the non-utility of nuclear weapons, both strategic and tactical, would require a build-up of America’s military-industrial surge capacity, a reduction in overseas commitments, or both. The former would require the reshoring of many lost industrial supply chains. The latter would require not merely burden-sharing among existing allies, but burden-shedding by Washington to former protectorates that would now have to protect themselves, with only residual support from the United States.

The century-old fantasy of a brief, decisive air war based on the use of weapons of mass destruction, whether poison gas or nuclear weapons, needs to be abandoned. Membership in the club of great powers in the future will be limited to those that can mobilize their industrial bases and manpower for protracted, large-scale conventional wars, in addition to more limited conflicts.

In addition, the Cold War–era concept of the escalation hierarchy, with strategic nuclear weapons at the top, needs to be reconsidered, if nuclear weapons are as useless in the next eight decades as they have been in the last eight. As the top rung of the escalation hierarchy, weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction and mass murder need to be replaced by a great power’s latent but mobilizable military-industrial power—together with related programs of civil and economic defense. Great powers would signal their seriousness not by shaking their nuclear spears but by taking the first steps to mobilize their economies. Military strategy should be decoupled from nuclear strategy and wedded to dual use civilian-military industrial strategy.

In short, in a world of multiple great powers, the United States can no longer afford hegemony on the cheap—even with the help of nuclear weapons to disguise the gap between American commitments and American power.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 4 (Winter 2025): 158–68

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Notes