The US, China and Russia Have a Three-Body Nuclear Problem
As Beijing strives for parity with Washington and Moscow and simultaneously aligns with the latter, America needs a new deterrence strategy.
The nuclear football, always in motion.
Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
To fathom the terror of our times, peek underneath the euphemisms “counterforce” and “countervalue.” One means nuking an adversary’s arsenal of atom bombs, the other refers to nuking entire populations of civilians. Oh, you thought we stopped talking about those things after the Cold War? Wrong. We’re discussing them again today — in Russia and China, and also in the US.
This old strategic controversy — whether to bomb missile silos or cities, basically — has come to the fore again because of China’s nuclear ambitions. These are turning what used to be a “two-body problem” of nuclear deterrence (between the US and the Soviet Union) into a “three-body problem” involving the US, Russia and China. That’s a physics metaphor: As Isaac Newton discovered, calculating stuff when factoring in the earth and moon was easy (for him, at least); adding the sun made the math well-nigh impossible.