By Franz-Stefan Gady
Yes, if U.S. nuclear strategists follow the advice of a new think tank study.
Maintaining nuclear superiority over China, rough parity with Russia, and developing a new set of forward-deployable tactical nuclear weapons are the principal recommendations of a new study by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The report, entitled “A Competitive Strategies Approach to Defining U.S. Nuclear Strategy and Posture for 2025-2050,” is the result of a forward looking,“blue-sky” review of U.S. nuclear strategy and posture by experts from three leading American national security think tanks.
The recommendations of the study, however, have exclusively been written by Clark A. Murdoch, a Washington bureaucrat and scholar, who argues that American conventional military superiority is one of the major triggers of nuclear proliferation in “the second nuclear age.”
“In ‘the second nuclear age,’ potential U.S. adversaries are thinking through how they might actually employ a nuclear weapon, both early in a conflict and in a discriminate manner, to get the United States to ‘back off’ in a conflict,” he notes, since “the prospect of a conventional-only war with the United States is a losing proposition for any state.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat