The writer, of Williamsburg, Va., is a former Air Force vice chief of staff and commander of Air Combat Command, which includes Offutt Air Force Base. He commanded nuclear bomber and missile forces at ACC.
Over the next few months, the president and the Senate have important decisions to make in the nuclear arena. One of them should be to start a new long-range nuclear bomber program to enforce deterrence and nuclear nonproliferation.
President Barack Obama is negotiating new strategic arms treaty limits for START I now. He will lead a review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty next May in Europe.
Both of these treaties have significant impacts on the future of our national security and that of our allies. Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command, has a big stake in the outcome.
Our strategy of deterrence is enforced through the nuclear triad of strategic bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and sea-launched ballistic missiles. In this post-Cold War era, defense officials have continued to validate the triad as the best mix of delivery systems for effective deterrence.
But the concept of “extended deterrence” is more important today to stop nuclear proliferation, and that makes the bomber more valuable.
Extended deterrence provides our umbrella of deterrence for others. The United States has made it clear to our friends and allies that they can depend on us to provide their nuclear deterrent. This is critically important for Japan, South Korea, the nations of NATO and our friends in the Middle East.
But that means we have to maintain a credible, robust nuclear force and the will to use it in defense of our allies. If our allies cannot depend on us, then they will be motivated to develop their own nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Most of them are capable of doing that in a few years.
A case in point is the insistence by NATO that we keep nuclear weapons in Europe when we wanted to remove them a few years ago. The nations of NATO consider U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe and the fighter-bomber aircraft to deliver them as essential to their deterrence.
So, extended deterrence is a major contributor to enforcing the nonproliferation treaty. If extended deterrence fails, then there will be double the number of nations with nuclear weapons in a short period of time. We cannot let that happen.
The strategic nuclear bomber is the delivery system that is most effective for achieving credible, extended deterrence.
Bombers give our president more options to enforce extended deterrence. He can launch them immediately to support our allies in hot spots around the world, then recall them as conditions change.
Bombers can fly in the neighborhoods of our allies to demonstrate resolve and support. They create the important characteristic of ambiguity to our adversaries, not knowing whether they carry nuclear or conventional weapons — or both.
Bombers become important political and psychological weapons for our allies by threatening the entire value system of an adversary in a single nuclear attack. And, most importantly, bombers enforce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by precluding other nations from becoming nuclear states, a destabilizing world situation.
Therefore, we need to ensure that our bomber force is capable for this role. Today, it is not. Our B-52s are old and cannot penetrate even modest defenses. Our B-2s are few in number and can penetrate some defense arrays but not all. Our B-1s are no longer nuclear carriers.
We need to start development of a new bomber that can penetrate and survive tomorrow’s toughest defenses and deliver nuclear weapons with precision. We have the technology and talent in the defense industry and in the Air Force to field a new bomber within 10 years.
By that time, we will need them not just for our own enforcement of deterrence but also to maintain the assurance our allies must have in us to provide for their deterrence.
A new bomber would provide the deterrence our nation and other nations expect and would ensure that Offutt Air Force Base remains at the forefront of our deterrence strategy.
As the president and the Senate do their work in renewing and ratifying our nuclear treaties, they should give important consideration to the means of enforcing these treaties. That means beefing up the bomber leg of the triad with a new bomber development.
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