Primary-Backup-Ready Spare

The Dash-N Chip; Out of the Pocket, Back on the Table

As Russia started to get her footing a few years ago and stretched back on to the international stage, so much of what was once thought gone has returned.

For those who lived through the Cold War or served through it, we are seeing the re-emergence of things we thought long forgotten.

This is not the hulking Soviet Union threat of old, no. Today’s Russia is deadly, but a shadow of the threat to the globe that the Soviet Union was. That being said, because of her size, personality, and legacy nuclear systems – she remains an existential threat.

We should not under estimate her power or potential. History is strewn with those who have. We should also not make her out to be something she is not at the end of the second decade of the 21st Century.

Russia’s economy unexpectedly contracted in November, hit by a drop in industrial production, the economy ministry said on Monday.

Gross domestic product shrank 0.3 percent year on year in November, the economy ministry said, contrasting with analysts’ consensus call for a 1.5 percent growth.

Russia’s oil-dependent economy was on the mend in 2017 after two years of recession, triggered by a sharp drop in global commodity prices as well as sanctions imposed by Western countries against Moscow for its role in the Ukrainian crisis.

In November, GDP was dragged down by the industrial sector where output contracted 3.6 percent compared with a year ago.

We watched in the two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union the huge arsenals of nuclear weapons – those that posed an existential threat to Western Civilization – shrink and fade.

The once prestigious and important nuclear weapons experts and planners shuffled down to “crazy Aunt in the basement” status. Sure, unstable nations were building nuclear bombs, not that was a different challenge.

On the edges of memory were the once top-of-the-fold nuclear weapons treaties, SALT, START, etc and entire classes of weapons they did away with.

On our own, to save money and not really seeing the need, we got rid of various legacy nuclear weapons including the nuclear version of the TLAM.

Let’s revisit that timeline.

2009:

As part of his September 1991 “Presidential Nuclear Initiatives,” President George H. W. Bush ordered the Navy to “withdraw all tactical nuclear weapons from its surface ships and attack submarines.” This included all nuclear-armed Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM-N) deployed on US ships, including some Los Angeles-class attack submarines. Nuclear Tomahawk has been in storage since the Navy completed the withdrawal in early 1992. The Navy now wants to complete retirement of the system by 2013.

Some current and former US and Japanese government officials oppose retirement of the Nuclear Tomahawk. A Secretary of Defense Task Force criticized the Navy for assessing the weapon on grounds of whether it is “militarily cost-effective.” The Task Force argued that this criterion “ignores the weapon’s political value.” In other contexts, US and Japanese officials have argued that the credibility of the US nuclear umbrella “relies heavily on the deployment” of the TLAM-N.

This memo, using only unclassified information, explains in plain language why the Department of Defense should retire the Nuclear Tomahawk. One shortcoming of the Nuclear Tomahawk stands out: the possibility that a Nuclear Tomahawk would accidentally crash in an allied country like Japan or South Korea.

2013:

Although the U.S. Navy has yet to make a formal announcement that the nuclear Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile (TLAM/N) has been retired, a new updated navy instruction shows that the weapon is gone.

The evidence comes not in the form of an explicit statement, but from what has been deleted from the U.S. Navy’s instruction Department of the Navy Nuclear Weapons Responsibilities and Authorities (SECNAVINST 8120.1A).

While the previous version of the instruction from 2010 included a whole sub-section describing TLAM/N responsibilities, the new version published on February 15, 2013, contains no mentioning of the TLAM/N at all and the previous sub-section has been deleted.

The U.S. Navy is finally out of the non-strategic nuclear weapons business.

Well, that only lasted a bit under a half a decade.

10-months ago Admiral Winnefeld, USN (Ret) and Dr. James Miller made the following point in Proceedings:

The West has been frustrated since 2012 over Russia’s decision to violate the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty by testing a new ground-launched cruise missile. The treaty, which eliminated nearly 2,700 missiles on both sides, prohibits production or flight test of any such missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. According to public reports, the Russians now have gone beyond testing and deployed the missile, further violating the treaty.

It is now time to stop scolding and up the ante. There is no reason for Russia to deploy these missiles. The Russians face no serious threat from west, east, or south—no nation on the planet wants to attack Russia. While diplomacy should not be abandoned, it will have to be backed by the only type of power Russia really understands: principled strength. In fact, the treaty itself originated from the use of such power: President Ronald Reagan deployed nuclear-tipped ground-launched cruise missiles and Pershing II ballistic missiles to Europe in response to a previous Russian deployment. This U.S. deployment laid the groundwork for successful negotiation of the INF Treaty.

An especially elegant use of such power would avoid a tit-for-tat violation of or, worse, a withdrawal from the treaty. Rather, Russia should feel the pinch from a capability that lies well within international agreements (and a capability Russia itself possesses): a sea-based nuclear-armed cruise missile. This would require restoration of the Navy’s nuclear capability on Tomahawk cruise missiles in what was known as TLAM-Ns—Tomahawk land-attack missile-nuclear.

And so, at the end of March 2018:

The U.S. Navy is going to have its Virginia-class attack submarines be armed with nuclear warheads, marking a history shift in how the submarines are used.

“While Virginia-class submarines can use conventional deterrence to keep adversaries in check, a sub-launched cruise missile with a nuclear warhead would be incorporated into Virginias and give national command authority additional escalation control,” Rear Adm. John Tammen, Director, Undersea Warfare Division, told Congress.

The new weapon, part of the Trump administration’s recent Nuclear Posture Review, is likely to bring a new element to the Pentagon’s current nuclear weapons deterrence posture. Currently, only the Ohio class and the emerging Columbia-class are capable of firing nuclear weapons.

That puts us back in the game.

Look back at Winnefeld & Millers comments about countering Russia’s nuclear moves. Good people can agree or disagree on the utility of a nuclear armed TLAM, but I think most would agree that you cannot bargain something for nothing. Russia may want to scale back some of her costs, and would unlikely remove capability for nothing as it would look weak.

If nothing else, TLAM-N gives us something to put on the table.

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