The evolution of strategic deterrence
Transcript
How has strategic deterrence evolved from the Cold War to contemporary times?
What is ‘strategic substitution,’ and how has China used it to craft its unique approach to deterrence?
How does the ‘Golden Dome’ proposed by the US fit into today’s debates on missile defence and counter-space capabilities?
Does Australia need to do more to close the capability gap in relation to China’s recent modernisation?
In this episode, Fiona Cunningham and Aaron Bateman join David Andrews to explore the evolution of strategic deterrence from the Cold War to contemporary times, with a focus on nuclear weapons, space capabilities and alternative approaches.
(This transcript is AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies.)
Aaron Bateman
It's in the 1970s that internally US officials start talking about how we can use space technologies to secure even greater qualitative advantages over the Soviet Union. And this idea that if there is going to be a conflict between the US and the Soviet Union, that that conflict is going to extend into space, that the Soviets are going to attack our space systems.
Fiona Cunningham
So what China plans to do is to threaten to use these non-nuclear capabilities in provocative ways to increase the risk of escalation in a conflict, including up to the nuclear level, but without China itself having to be the country to threaten nuclear weapons use.
National Security Podcast
You’re listening to the National Security Podcast , the show that brings you expert analysis, insights, and opinion on the national security challenges faces by Australia and the Indo-Pacific - produced by the ANU National Security College.
David Andrews
Welcome to the National Security Podcast. I'm David Andrews, Senior Manager for Policy and Engagement at the ANU National Security College. Today's podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, and I pay my respects to their elders, past and present. This week I'm joined by Fiona Cunningham and Aaron Bateman to discuss strategic deterrence from the Cold War to today. Fiona Cunningham is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, a research affiliate with the MIT Security Studies Program, an on resident scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and an expert associate at NSC. Fiona's research interests lie in the intersection of technology and conflict with an empirical focus on China. Aaron Bateman is assistant professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University and a historian of contemporary science and technology. He studies how technology shaped US foreign policy, defence strategy, alliance dynamics, and superpower competition in the Cold War, and his research is supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Stanton Foundation.
Fiona and Aaron, welcome to the podcast.
Aaron Bateman
Thank you.
Fiona Cunningham
Thank you.
David Andrews
You've both written and researched extensively on this concept of strategic deterrence, which I think we’ll go on to explain a little bit more in detail for the listeners, and looking at both in its Cold War and contemporary expressions. Deterrence is a concept that we've been talking about a lot in Australia, particularly since the release of the 2023 Defence Strategic Review and the 2024 National Defence Strategy. But I'm conscious that there are many different forms or types of deterrence out there in the literature, whether that's nuclear or conventional general deterrence and so forth. Could you explain for us what you mean when you refer to strategic deterrence and maybe even deterrence in general?
Fiona Cunningham
Sure, so to give a bit of the 101 on deterrence, it means to threaten to hurt an adversary or a counterpart, to stop that counterpart or adversary from doing something that it might otherwise choose to do. And usually the intent there is to stop that opponent from changing the status quo. And the idea is that when you deter someone, you are changing their cost benefit calculus about taking a certain action to increase the costs of doing so relative to the benefits and therefore stopping them from or dissuading them if you like from taking that action. So you can use different tools to deter an adversary and you can try to deter different types of behaviour. Those types of tools that you can use to deter an adversary include nuclear weapons, conventional weapons, they can include counter space weapons like anti-satellite weapons, economic sanctions, naming and shaming. And the kinds of actions that you can try to prevent using deterrence can include anything from using nuclear weapons to starting a conventional war to attacking your allies or using certain capabilities once you're in a conflict.
So I think when we talk about deterrence, it's quite helpful to always be specific about what you're trying to deter, what actions and also what kinds of tools you're planning to use to deter them. And I think that's why in my writing, I've referred to this term of strategic deterrence. And when I use the word strategic, it's really referring to the kinds of tools that are used to threaten to hurt an adversary to stop it from doing something you don't want to do. So specifically, the strategic usually refers to how countries are going to use their nuclear weapons, but also some of the non-nuclear capabilities that have strategic effects, so effects that go straight to an adversary's decision makers rather than having an impact, say, on battlefield commanders. So the strategic in strategic deterrence is really about the kind of tools that you're using to threaten an adversary. But often, I think, when we're discussing strategic deterrence, sometimes people are also thinking about the types of activities that you're looking to deter, and that most frequently is using nuclear weapons or trying to prevent the outbreak of wars that could threaten another country's survival. So these really high level, important, most destructive sort of set of consequences. So that's the kind of realm of activities that we're talking about.
David Andrews
Aaron, how does that line up with your understanding of the issue?
Aaron Bateman
So I'll come at this from two different angles. One is particularly focused on space and how our understanding of deterrence in space has evolved from the Cold War to the post-Cold War period. So if we look back in the Cold War period, Space technologies were key enablers of deterrence both conventional and nuclear. And one of the things that we saw in the Cold War was anxiety among the United States and its allies about the Soviet Union developing counter-space capabilities to be able to attack US and allied space systems. And so there were questions about, how do we deter the Soviets from doing that? And the problem was that there was significant asymmetry in dependence on space capabilities. The United States and its allies were really dependent on space but had a few number of systems. The Soviet Union was less dependent on space and had developed weapons to attack US and allied space systems. And so it was very difficult to develop your own counter space capabilities to deter the Soviet Union from using it against the United States and its allies. If you fast forward to the post-Cold War era, what we find is that now China, for example, is heavily dependent on space capabilities for power projection and the United States and its allies are putting up far more systems in orbit.
And so we now have a situation in which the United States is pursuing a deterrence by denial framework in which you have so many capabilities in orbit that even if you are attacked, you can absorb those attacks. So in the space domain, I would say this is a really significant change from the Cold War to today. The other point that I would just add on to what Fiona said is I think that as a Cold War historian, when I look back at the scholarship, the policy writing, the academic literature on deterrence, I think that allies are generally missing from that equation. And so one of the points that I would make is that allies, including Australia, have historically been key enablers of nuclear deterrence by hosting facilities that are used for nuclear command and control and nuclear early warning that enabled the United States to operate this nuclear war machine. And sometimes that has created complexities in those alliance relationships. And sometimes that has been a source of even greater strength in those alliance relationships. But allies are key enablers and have long been key enablers of US deterrence.
David Andrews
Well, that's very interesting to unpack, I think, and hopefully we'll get into some of that alliance piece as well. I think especially now that we're seeing, as I say, a concert of deterrence being back at the forefront of Australian political debates and strategic debates, I think in understanding it, not just from how we are seeking to deter independently, but our role in a sort of collective alliance deterrent posture as well is clearly critical. But Fiona, picking up on what you were saying before about this distinction between, say, a general understanding of deterrence and this more specific strategic deterrence concept. Do you think that that is a concept that's understood in the same or in a similar way between the key nuclear armed powers across the world? mean, obviously we've just been, Aaron's mentioned there's this long Cold War history of these concepts, but how has our understanding in other countries' approaches evolved since then? What are we seeing, I suppose principally, in China's approach to strategic deterrence?
Fiona Cunningham
So I think from my perspective, this idea of deterrence, that you make threats to try and stop your adversary from doing things that you don't want to do. And in the nuclear realm, you threaten to use nuclear weapons to try and stop your adversary from doing something that you don't want them to do, is fairly common across all nuclear powers. And certainly the two that I know best from my research, which is the United States and China. But I think what's different is what they are often threatening to use their nuclear weapons to try to deter. And that is going to be quite sensitive to a whole set of conflict objectives. What is it that these countries want to achieve in the world? And then what role they assign nuclear weapons to do so compared to other tools that they have at their disposal. So I think, for example, and Aaron was talking a little bit about the Cold War, this was obviously the conclusion of the Cold War. It shifted a lot of the conditions that the US, China, obviously Russia as well were then facing thereafter. One of the big shifts for China at the end of the Cold War is that it was no longer trying to deter a superpower attack on its homeland that would threaten its survival. And it was really transitioning to thinking a lot more about how it would achieve objectives and what it called local wars.
These are conflicts on its periphery that would have been limited in their intensity, the parties, the scope that don't necessarily involve the survival of the state. And for that kind of a more limited conflict, there is perhaps less of a role for nuclear weapons or a credibility problem when it comes to threatening to use nuclear weapons. And so when we look at how China has thought about the role of nuclear weapons more broadly in achieving its political objectives... Interestingly enough, even when it did face threats to its survival during the Cold War, it actually relied a lot more on its landmass and the size of its population to try and exhaust an adversary's conventional invasion and really relegated its nuclear weapons to a very specific role of deterring a nuclear attack. And a lot of that approach carried through into the post-Cold War era, largely because threatening nuclear weapons use wouldn't be credible for some of these more limited objectives.
David Andrews
I think a point that we've picked up already is this one of credibility. And I think that's maybe a dimension which seems to me is maybe more important in the nuclear deterrent space than in other fields. And the question of where is a credible boundary or threat that would require that use of nuclear force? I think that applies both to the US and to China and the Soviet Union and others previously. But could you maybe expand a little bit on that aspect of credibility and how important it is or how that fits into the picture of nuclear deterrence.
Fiona Cunningham
Right. So I think this is especially a challenge when you have two countries that possess nuclear weapons. I mean, I think it's an issue even when you have one country that does and one that does not. But when you have a situation with two countries that both possess nuclear weapons, if they have a certain quality of armament, which we would call a secure second strike, if you say I'm going to I'm the United States, I'm going to attack China with nuclear weapons, China has the capacity to retaliate with nuclear weapons too. And so then you have this credibility problem of saying, am I actually willing to absorb the kinds of costs that will be necessary for me to use nuclear weapons to carry out or to back a threat or an objective that I'm trying to pursue? Because I myself am going to suffer quite dramatically if I carry out that threat. So in the nuclear space, this credibility problem is particularly pernicious and particularly pernicious among two countries that both possess secure second-strike capabilities.
But I think even when you have an asymmetry of a country that does and does not have nuclear weapons, there is still a number of costs that a country would pay for threatening to use nuclear weapons because it's often seen as completely disproportionate for anything really other than when your survival is threatened. So countries in the nuclear age have taken a number of steps to try and make their threats to use nuclear weapons more credible when they seek to use them in a more expansive set of circumstances. So things like deploying low-yield nuclear weapons, having certain types of declaratory policies in the case of, for example, Pakistan, delegating authority down to some of the lower-level commanders so that it's more easy to use nuclear weapons and hence the threat to use them will be more credible. But it's an issue that shows up not just in the nuclear realm, any deterrent threat has to be credible and the credibility piece depends on more than just having the capabilities, but also the will and the communication of that.
Aaron Bateman
So I think if you look back in the late Cold War period, something that you find that's relevant to this discussion is that the Soviets were really anxious that the United States was developing new technologies that could enable precision strikes and a level of destruction that you might have only associated with nuclear weapons prior to that. And the Soviets did not have those same capabilities. And so in that kind of a scenario, the Soviets would continue to have to rely on nuclear weapons, whereas the United States was developing what we would today call long range precision strike. And that introduced a significant degree of uncertainty into the Soviet calculus for actually how would a conflict play out in Europe between NATO and the Soviet Union and what were going to be the implications of those capabilities.
David Andrews
Taking a step beyond this, Fiona, you've recently published a book which proposes a new concept of strategic substitution to describe China's approach to coercion and strategic deterrence. Can you maybe expand on that idea for us a little bit and articulate what it is you're arguing for in that?
Fiona Cunningham
I mean, it dovetails really nicely. I think with the conversation we've had thus far about how China might think a little bit differently about when to use nuclear weapons, but also this issue of credibility, because in many ways, China's choice of strategic substitution at its heart is concerned about what credible strategic deterrence when you're facing a limited war. So I'll step back for one second and just offer a quick definition because I'm going to use the term coercive leverage in explaining one of the key arguments of this book. Coercion, some people will say it's the same as compellence. Compellence is this idea that you issue a threat not to stop your adversary from doing something, but to make your adversary do something like give you a piece of territory they wouldn't otherwise use.
Coercion I use in this book is a kind of umbrella term, so I'm looking at agnostically, if you like, as to whether a country is using a set of capabilities for compellence or deterrence. And so the term coercive leverage, which is a kind of core piece of the book, refers to the tools that are backing these kinds of coercive threats.
So what is a strategic substitution? At its core, this is how China has dealt with this dilemma that all nuclear armed states have faced since the dawn of the nuclear age, which is that if I have an adversary who also has nuclear weapons, I will often still have political disputes with that country. I will want to use my military forces to pursue my interests in that political dispute, but I also don't want to trigger a catastrophic nuclear war. And so this is a true dilemma. No country has managed to solve it. But most have either approached it by threatening to use conventional military forces that could win the war or, therefore, alternatively threaten to use nuclear weapons to escalate what's otherwise a conventional war. So we can think of that as being the kind of Russian approach, while that conventional dominance approach being one more associated with the United States in the post-Cold War era. China didn't do either of these things. It adopted its own distinctive approach to dealing with this dilemma, which basically involved pairing a nuclear strategy threatening to retaliate with nuclear weapons only if China was attacked first with nuclear weapons with a set of postures for non-nuclear capabilities. And here I'm talking about counter-space capabilities of the kind that Aaran was talking about at the start of our conversation, precision strike capabilities that he also mentioned with conventional warheads, but also most recently offensive cyber operations targeting an adversary's critical infrastructure.
So what China plans to do is to threaten to use these non-nuclear capabilities in provocative ways to increase the risk of escalation in a conflict, including up to the nuclear level, but without China itself having to be the country to threaten nuclear weapons use. So what this permits China then to do is to sort of manipulate or increase the risk of escalation, but place the burden on an adversary like the United States to actually use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. And the reason that China pursued this strategic substitution approach is sort of twofold. The first is that the legacy of its capabilities in the Cold War didn't really give it a clear answer of conventional dominance or an answer of nuclear first use like the US and Russia, those more traditional examples of dealing with this dilemma that I mentioned earlier. So it had a sort of tabula rasa in thinking about how it would deal with this limited war dilemma in the post-Cold War era. The second reason is that China had both serious concerns that threatening nuclear weapons first use for these limited conflict objectives over something like a Taiwan Straits crisis would be credible. And it was also deeply conventionally inferior to the US when it started to formulate this approach in the 1990s. And so this option of strategic substitution gave it an answer that both addressed its conventional inferiority as well as its concerns about the credibility of threatening nuclear first use in a future conflict.
David Andrews
How long has this been China's approach for, would you say? Is there something that has specifically prompted them to go down this path or is it more of a sort of a phased evolution? This is probably an imperfect comparison in many ways, but when I think of China's approach to naval modernization, having started with this prioritization on anti-access areal denial and surface-based, shore-based missile systems and fast attack craft evolving into the next phase and the next phase, and now we're seeing them with long range surface combatants, nuclear powered submarines, aircraft carriers and things that it's continued to evolve over time, but still with a core function. Does that trend hold true in this sort of strategic deterrent space and the strategic substitution or was there sort of a something key that prompted them to change path and adopt this as their model of choice?
Fiona Cunningham
So I think that the broader conventional modernization for China and its approach to strategic deterrence, the decision making there runs according to slightly different logics. And so I think for me, the really key moment that my research demonstrated influenced China's selection of strategic substitution was the 1995 and 1996 Taiwan Straits crises. And the reason that they were such a watershed for China is prior to that point in time, Chinese leaders weren't totally sure that if there was a future crisis between China and Taiwan, that they were going to see the United States intervening on behalf of the Taiwanese. And so that crisis demonstrated to China that going forward, it really needed to factor in a conflict that involved the most powerful conventional and nuclear power on the planet, the United States. So it was really a watershed moment for the PRC having this Taiwan Strait crisis because it demonstrated it couldn't simply take the kind of phased evolved approach that you were describing with its naval capabilities, despite having made a choice in the early 1990s that it would embark on a long-term conventional modernization program for its military forces. Because if it simply continued along that pathway, if there was another crisis before that modernization were complete, China would either have to fight a war that it would lose or alternatively it would have to make humiliating diplomatic concessions.
So that crisis really, I think, served to draw attention to the urgency of the problem that China faced, that it lacked coercive leverage to make it too dangerous or too costly for the US to intervene. There was one other key event that also added to the evolution of China's strategic substitution approach, and that was the bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo air war in 1999, which China's leaders believed was an intentional act of hostility rather than an accident, which is what the United States says happened. And so you have these sort of two shocks to the system, which I call leverage deficits in 1995 and 96, and again in 1999. And after each of them, China decides to develop these three information age capabilities that I earlier mentioned, precision conventional missiles, offensive cyber operations targeting, adversary critical infrastructure, as well as its counter space capabilities. Since those decisions, which were now nearly a quarter century ago, China's capabilities have evolved for all of these areas. They've gone from basically very, very, very nascent capabilities to full blown mature postures. And China has learned things about those capabilities through that time. The US also hasn't stood still. The capabilities themselves have evolved. But I haven't seen sort of other major cut points, if you like, that have affected how China coped with this limited war dilemma issue since that period of time.
National Security Podcast
We'll be right back.
In this disrupted world, Australia needs security professionals more than ever. Join the next generation studying at the ANU National Security College. Our programs uniquely fuse academic knowledge with practitioner experience and fit around your lifestyle with study offered online and on campus. Follow the link in the show notes for more information about programs and scholarships. The ANU National Security College. Engaging minds for a secure Australia.
David Andrews
One point we'll come back to is, I guess, the consequences of this for the contemporary environment and policymaking in the US and Australia as well. But I wanted to jump back to Aaron and some of the things that you were talking about before. And you've also published a book on this theme of strategic deterrence, but looking more back at the Reagan era Strategic Defense Initiative, which was, for those that don't know, a space-based missile defence program that aimed to protect the US from nuclear attack, and which some of you might also know as given the somewhat derisive nickname of the Star Wars Initiative or program. And we're now talking about Golden Dome as the new thing that's being talked about in US missile defence. And that's not just in terms of nuclear weapons, but conventionally equipped hypersonic missiles and that sort of thing. While appreciating that we don't really know very much about this potentially nascent Golden Dome system, could you maybe contextualize us in that bigger picture of the Strategic Defense Initiative and these new measures of that whole approach to deterrence and defence that the US has taken in these ways?
Aaron Bateman
Yeah, sure. So I think what I oftentimes do with the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI is some myth busting because there's some very entrenched ideas about what SDI was. And the first thing that I would say is that SDI was an umbrella for multiple research and development efforts into technologies with missile defence applications. And so SDI's whole purpose, its raison d'etre, was to field ultimate multilayered missile defence system with land and space-based interceptors to be able to go after ballistic missiles in all phases of flight. And ultimately over time as the Cold War comes to an end and the relationship between Washington and Moscow changes and for a period of time becomes more positive, the US ultimately downgrades its investment in missile defence to just ground-based interceptors. And so that's one piece. The second thing that I would emphasize is that SDI was not something that was just a bolt out of the blue in the Reagan era, but really grows out of a massive shift in US thinking about the role of space technologies in US national security. And so we typically think of space as a war fighting domain as being something fairly recent. And while that language is indeed recent, only goes back to 2019, we actually find that it's in the 1970s that internally US officials start talking about how can we use space technologies to secure even greater qualitative advantages over the Soviet Union. And this idea that if there is going to be a conflict between the US and the Soviet Union, that that conflict is going to extend into space, that the Soviets are going to attack our space systems.
And so moving into the 1980s, Reagan is really building on this idea that space technologies can be used to secure significant advantages for the United States and its allies. And so if we look at the long tale of SDI and Fiona can certainly talk about this from the Chinese perspective with greater expertise than I can. But even though the space-based interceptor part of SDI goes away in the 1990s, Russia and China continue to be anxious about the United States reverting back to a posture in which it's investing in space-based interceptors. And so that's one point. The second thing that I would emphasize with the myth-busting piece is that there's this idea that SDI was either going to work or it wasn't going to work. That you either have 100 % perfect defence or the whole system or system of systems is just really nonsensical. And what's really important to emphasize is that SDI was never intended to provide 100 % defence. The idea was that you just take out enough of your adversaries ballistic missile launches. So if we're talking about the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union does a large scale ICBM attack against the United States, that you have the capacity to take out enough of them that that is going to enhance your overall deterrent posture, that that would give the Soviets a sense of pause before employing nuclear weapons in a crisis or a conflict. And so if we fast forward to Golden Dome, as you alluded to, we don't actually really have a clear idea of what Golden Dome is going to look like. We know that the Department of Defense in the United States is looking at space-based interceptors as a core element of it to be able to go after ballistic missiles in their boost phase of flight. But I think it's important to recognize that Golden Dome is unlikely to even be designed to provide 100 % comprehensive defence. That's just really not on the table. And so it's not an all or nothing kind of scenario.
David Andrews
And I suppose we're also now seeing conversations, or have for several years, around ground-based interceptors like THAAD in South Korea, for example, that are still obviously hugely controversial for China in that same picture about how their perceptions that this is undermining their nuclear deterrent by potentially sort of taking out any missiles of theirs that might be launched as well. But would you say, or is this a mischaracterization to suggest that the push for the SDI was a major contributor to the bigger movement towards the militarization of space? I know you said that China and Russia obviously paid a lot of attention to that and were anxious about that capability gap, but were things already heading in that direction or was this a big pivot point in moving towards a more militarized space domain?
Aaron Bateman
So I think it's important to stress that space was really militarized from the beginning of the space age. And the United States, the Soviet Union, and even US allies put up certain space capabilities that have direct military applications, so intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. The US had nuclear early warning and nuclear command and control satellites, et cetera. Why SDI was really viewed as a significant point on the timeline of space militarization, if you will, is that the United States was contemplating putting up hundreds or even thousands of weapons in space that could be used for missile defence. But the other thing that the Soviet Union was really anxious about, and now Russia and China are also anxious about, is those same interceptors that can be used to shoot down ballistic missiles can also be used to shoot down your adversary's satellites.
So if you think about ground-based missile defence interceptors, they can also be repurposed to shoot down satellites. But if you have the weapons already in space, they can also be repurposed for a counter space role. And so if we think back to the 1980s, the Soviet Union was legitimately concerned about the missile defence role of SDI technologies. But the Soviets were also very concerned that the United States would be acquiring an enhanced counter space capability to be able to attack and degrade Soviet space capabilities in a wartime scenario. So missile defence is not just about missile defence. It's also about counter-space. And we see that from the US standpoint as well - US anxieties about Russian investment in missile defence capabilities that have also turned out to have counter-space applications and same with China. And so when you're talking about missile defence technologies, you are also talking about counter-space technologies.
David Andrews
I think you've just touched on this to some extent, but how would you think of the legacy for the SDI as applying today? I mean, whether that's for the US or Russia or China, has it prompted states to, I guess, prioritise certain aspects of their forced posture or military modernization, or are the US and its allies actually well equipped to counter those threats now?
Aaron Bateman
So I think one of the interesting things you can see from the archival record from the Soviet and then the Russian side is just going off of publicly available information. If we look at some of the counter space capabilities that Russia has fielded in the last 15 years or so, a lot of those concepts were originally developed in the late 1970s and especially the 1980s as the Soviets are thinking about how would we respond to the Americans developing space-based missile defence. And so when we think about the technologies that Russia is fielding, it is in many ways a direct response to what could have been if the Cold War had persisted even longer. And so that's one piece of it. But the other thing that we have to remember is that SDI did not go away. SDI was renamed and it was repurposed. So when Reagan leaves office and George H.W. Bush becomes president, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization that managed SDI is renamed and ultimately becomes the US Missile Defense Agency. And so when Russia and China are looking at US missile defence in the 1990s and early 2000s, yes, the US is not investing in space-based interceptors, but SDI led to a permanent infrastructure in the United States for missile defence research and development. And that has also been a source of anxiety for both Beijing and Moscow.
Fiona Cunningham
And I will just also add here that although relations between China and the United States were in relative terms quite good in the 1980s, even China initiated research and development programs following the announcement of SDI that were the technological precursors, if you like, for some of her thinking about non-kinetic counter-space capabilities that ultimately they made a decision to pursue after that Belgrade embassy bombing in 1999. So there's a really long tail of kind of technological preparation for counter space capabilities that this initiative on the US part suggested even for countries that weren't really US adversaries at the time.
Aaron Bateman
And in addition to the missile defence and counter space anxieties, if we just focus on the Soviets and then the Russian Federation, one of the other anxieties is that to do missile defence on the scale that we're talking about, you need to have a lot of sensors to be able to track and target those missiles in flight. And so the Soviets are really worried that greater U.S. investment in the sensors for missile defence would also lead to US advantages for being able to precisely target Soviet forces. And so the Soviets talked about reconnaissance strike complexes, which is marrying together sensors and precision strike capabilities to be able to hit targets deep behind enemy lines. And so the Soviets were looking at US missile defence investment and saying, this is going to allow the United States to get even further ahead in a wide variety of high technology arenas that is going to assist the United States with both conventional and nuclear war fighting. And so that's why I really want to stress that missile defence research and development, it's a cornucopia of technologies with a lot of different applications. And that is really seen as a way for the United States to leap forward in a wide variety of defence arenas, not just missile defence or even counter space.
David Andrews
Perhaps to sort of then bring this back to where we'd started and that concept of maintaining deterrence and upholding peace between nuclear armed powers, I guess ensuring there aren't credibility gaps as well. And I think with every new technology that change in the calculus for all the different partners and players in this nuclear deterrence game, what do think we can learn from these different examples and approaches, be it the of the historic Strategic Defence Initiative or sort of China's recent modernization? Is there more that Australia and the US and others need to be doing to close a credibility or capability gap with relation to China now that it's got these more counter space and sort of other capabilities in its arsenal? Are there things that we should be doing to pursue our own version of strategic substitution, I suppose?
Fiona Cunningham
I think that there are a couple of things that, at least I've drawn out of my research thinking a little bit more comparatively, if you like, of how China has dealt with some similar issues that the United States has also grappled with. And the key point for me is that for as long as you have political disputes, countries will look for coercive leverage and they're going to end up tailoring those choices of what their strategic deterrence posture looks like based on what their national strengths and weaknesses are in China's case, being conventionally inferior previously, but also their assessments of what the promise of certain technologies is like. So investing in things like offensive cyber operations really to time then when they were fairly nascent, but also this persistent concern about the credibility of making nuclear threats. So there's a kind of tailoring, if you like, of what capabilities are used for gaining that coercive leverage. And that's not going to look obviously the same between different types of countries. But it does suggest that if you want to manage these risks, you've got to look at both the capabilities, but also about the political disputes at the root. Because the political disputes at the root are the reasons why you end up getting into a conflict where countries will use these kinds of strategic deterrence capabilities.
But the technologies themselves can also generate their own types of risks. I think Aaron talking about this crossover between anti-satellite and missile defence technologies is one example where a country pursues, in China's case, counter-space capabilities. The United States might look at those and think of them as missile defence in the context of China's very large buildup of its nuclear forces in part because of some of its concerns about US missile defence. The US then might look at what China is doing and think that it's pursuing its own form of nuclear superiority and moving away from some of the more restrained ways of thinking of using nuclear weapons as it had previously. So there are sort of technology-based misperceptions that also, I think, generate their own risks. So you need to look at both the root cause of the political dispute, but also how you manage these technology-specific risks. And I think on the US responses and the how we should think about our own forms of strategic substitution - the US hasn't stood still, and indeed its allies haven't stood still, while China has developed a suite of capabilities in this strategic deterrence domain. It pulled out of the INF Treaty in part because of China's conventional missile development. So China's advantage there could kind of become a victim of its own success.
Similarly, it has evaluated and reevaluated the kind of leverage that you can get from offensive cyber operations. And I think now China and the United States might look at this capability and its potential a little bit differently since the US has moved away from thinking of cyber capabilities as providing very big coordinated strategic effects. I think the US hasn't stood still, but interestingly enough, one of the common questions I've received when I have shared my findings from my book recently is can US allies, who maybe have perennial concerns about the US providing the nuclear component of their deterrence through an extended deterrence arrangement, can they get more sovereign coercive leverage by investing in some similar capabilities to what China has developed? I think it's a tricky conversation, but we see already, I think, in South Korea and Japan some interest in building up conventional counter-strike capabilities that do look relatively similar to how China built up its conventional capabilities with them. I think some interesting questions about the guidance and sensing capabilities that support them and to what degree they're intertwined then with the US.
Aaron Bateman
So I think what I would add to that is just a word of caution perhaps about leaning too far into Cold War analogies. And I think something I frequently hear is we're in a new Cold War, Cold War 2.0. But I think it's important to look back and recognize that there are some very important lessons. And I would also say that those lessons are changing. As archives open up, we now have a much better understanding, an imperfect one, but a better understanding of the US-Soviet dynamics and US investment in certain capabilities. It is very clear mutually assured destruction was never US policy and the US was consistently investing in capabilities to escape MAD and understanding what the implications of that were for conflict escalation and management. These are still things that historians are grappling with. But when we fast forward to the post-Cold War era, there are some important lessons that I think that we can think about.
One, is the implications of everything that we've discussed for arms control. And arms control is not a very optimistic topic right now, but going back to what Fiona just mentioned about crossover of different capabilities, one of the things in the Cold War, in the 1980s in particular, that was a really significant challenge is when the US and the Soviets were talking about limits on counter space capabilities. Well, you couldn't talk about that without limits on missile defence. And that became an impediment. And so it's even more challenging if you try to achieve these kinds of similar goals of limits on certain capabilities when you add in another party. Now it's not just the US and Russia, but now you have US, Russia, China. You have a proliferation of counter space capabilities beyond those three powers. And so in the post-Cold War era, it's an even more complex international security environment. And so I think it's important to look back to revisit some of these ideas that we have about the nature of the US Soviet competition. But I think we also need to do so with eyes wide open that there are limits to that Cold War history if we're looking for a model that can just be superimposed on the present security challenges that we face. And so as a historian, I of course stress Cold War history is essential. It's the foundation. But we also need to recognize that there are really significant differences today that would lead me to be cautious about characterizing this as a new Cold War.
David Andrews
Fiona Cunningham and Aaron Bateman. I that's been a tremendous conversation covering on nuclear strategy and alliance posture, technological evolution, all sorts of wonderful things and a devilishly complex question that we're dealing with. But I'll just say, we'll put these in the show notes, but “Under the Nuclear Shadow, China's Information Age Weapons and International Security” from Fiona Cunningham. And “Weapons in Space, Technology, Politics and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative” by Aaron Bateman. Recommend them both to all our listeners and thank you again for coming on the podcast.
Aaron Bateman
Thank you.
Fiona Cunningham
Thank you so much for having us.
National Security Podcast
Thank you for listening to the national security podcast. We welcome listener feedback and suggestions at any time. So please get in contact at natsecpod@anu.edu.au. For more important conversations about Australia’s national security, please subscribe to the podcast, our YouTube channel, and follow us n LinkedIn and Twitter to receive the latest updates.