What Americans Think about the US Nuclear Stockpile

by CKR

My last post on this subject meandered. To summarize it, all the nuclear nations but the United States and Russia have stockpiles of several tens to several hundreds of nuclear weapons, while the United States and Russia have stockpiles in the thousands. They have agreed to decrease those stockpiles to about two thousand each by 2012, which means they will each have totals of about six thousand nuclear weapons in various stages of readiness. It is hard to see what so many weapons are needed for, other than a first strike against each other. Meanwhile, the US nuclear complex is barely able to produce new nuclear weapons and is disassembling existing weapons far too slowly to reach the 2012 goal. The Department of Energy would like to build a modernized weapons complex by 2030, but it will need guidance on the size of the stockpile in order to plan that complex.

The House Appropriations Committee is now insisting on a rationale for the US nuclear arsenal before it will vote on appropriations for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). The Senate is expected to follow suit.

The US nuclear weapons arsenal grew out of the initial perceived race with Nazi Germany for the bomb, followed by hectic competition with the Soviet Union. But that competition ended in the late eighties.

Let me be a bit technical here, in the political science sense. I’m restating an argument that Jack Matlock makes in Autopsy on an Empire (particularly pp 143-144). The doctrine of class struggle was essential to the Soviet Union’s conduct of internal and external affairs.

According to Marx, society was divided into classes on the basis of their relationship to the means of production. These classes were destined to struggle for domination, and ultimately the most numerous and deprived class, the proletariat, would win. Thereupon, it would establish its dictatorship over society, eliminate the other classes, and eventually create a Communist paradise on earth.

The Communist Party was the only true representative of the proletariat, and therefore it was justified in any and all actions to bring about this paradise, including nuclear war. In July 1988, an article in Pravda quoting Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Union’s foreign minister, said

Coexistence, which is founded on such principles as nonaggression, respect for sovereignty and national independence, noninterference in internal affairs, etc., must not be identified with the class struggle. The struggle of two opposing systems is no longer the decisive tendency of the contemporary age.

Other Soviet officials, including Mikhail Gorbachev, repeated this message over subsequent months. This is the event that Matlock takes as the end of the Cold War.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 clearly marked the end of the nuclear rivalry that had prevailed over more than forty years. Popular reaction in the United States was relief that the nuclear threat was ended.

The first issues that the government had to deal with, however, were the reunification of Germany, received with trepidation by its neighbor states who had suffered from a united Germany’s militarism through the previous century; and the control of the Soviet nuclear weapons that were stationed in independent Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. US nuclear weapons policy was thought by some to be so obviously changed that they gave little thought to it, or by others to be in need of continuation until it was clear that we were not being conned by the Soviets, er, Russians.

So George H. W. Bush finished up the business of Germany and return of those nuclear weapons to Russia, and then there was a new president, one whose primary interests were domestic. Missiles remained targeted as they had been during the Cold War (and still are now). Just before the 1992 election, Bush had declared a moratorium on all nuclear testing that Bill Clinton managed to parlay into his signing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1995. Unfortunately, for a variety of domestic political reasons, ratification of the treaty failed in the Senate.

Which brings us to today. The recent House vote is encouraging, because Congress otherwise seems to be significantly behind public opinion. But what is public opinion on the US nuclear stockpile? The war in Iraq has tended to drown out discussion of this subject, except when the question of nuking Iran arises.

The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) published a poll, “Americans on WMD Proliferation,” in April 2004. Other polls have included relevant questions here and there, but a single poll is more likely to give internally consistent answers, so I’m going to use only this poll. It’s hard to believe that these attitudes have changed for the more hawkish in the past three years.

How many nuclear weapons do Americans think their country has, and how many do they think it should have?

Americans grossly underestimate the size of the US nuclear arsenal. Asked “How many nuclear weapons do you think the US has in the US, or on submarines, that are ready to be used on short notice,” the median estimate was 200. This is far below the actual number of approximately 6,000 active strategic warheads, more than 2,000 of which are on high alert. Only 18% gave an estimate of 1,000 weapons or more.

Despite this low estimate, respondents showed a readiness to cut the size of the arsenal even lower. Asked “How many weapons do you think the US needs to make sure other countries are deterred from attacking it,” the median response was a mere 100—a 50% cut below the perceived level.

PIPA is referring to active strategic warheads; the current total is closer to 10,000.

Although most Americans surveyed were not aware that the US had committed to eventual nuclear weapons elimination as part of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, most thought it was a good idea and that the US should make greater efforts toward that goal.

Only 39% said that they were aware, while 59% said they were not.

However, an overwhelming majority approved of the US making such a commitment. Respondents were then asked, “Do you think it was a good idea or a bad idea for the US to agree to work toward eliminating nuclear weapons as part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty?” Eighty-four percent said that it was a good idea, while just 14% said it was a bad idea. An even higher 86% said the “US should… do more to work with the other nuclear powers toward eliminating their nuclear weapons.”

Majorities also felt it was not necessary to develop new nuclear weapons and supported reducing the role of nuclear weapons in US defense, full destruction of nuclear weapons rather than just disassembly, detargeting nuclear missiles, and participation in the CTBT.

Public opinion is not a reliable single source on which to build policy; the state of factual knowledge uncovered by this poll is not very good. But it appears that Congress and the public are moving in the same direction: toward a nuclear policy that fits the post-Cold War world, now that almost twenty years have elapsed since that conflict ended.