Strategic Stability in the 21^st Century: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

The concept of strategic stability has come under immense pressure in recent years. It is not only conceptually fuzzy but nuclear multipolarity, novel technologies, an exacerbating crisis in arms control, and a growing acceptance of “softer” norms are all taking a toll. At the same time, nuclear weapon states are concerned with possible instability to a degree not seen since the most severe crises of the Cold War. This special issue seeks to clarify some of the profound challenges to strategic stability while also offering novel scholarly as well as policy-relevant approaches to better understanding and mitigating the risks of instability. The three articles and one commentary focus on the US-Russian dyad and pragmatic efforts to clarify the goals and means of strategic stability between Moscow and Washington; the impact of emerging technologies in Russia’s war against Ukraine; US and Russian leaders’ perceptions of artificial intelligence as a novel and threatening capability of competition; and possible US efforts to initiate an arms control dialogue with China by early discussions on crisis management.

KEYWORDS:

• strategic stability
• nuclear weapons
• United States
• Russia
• China
• emerging technologies

On 3 January 2022, the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States – reaffirmed, for the first time in a joint statement, the famous 1985 dictum of Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, according to which “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” (White House 2022). Less than two months later, Vladimir Putin warned in conjunction with Russia’s attack on Ukraine: “No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history” (President of Russia 2022). Having suspended the so-called “Strategic Stability Dialogue” (SSD) in reaction to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the United States declared “the issues that have been laid out [in the SSD framework] prior to Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine are even more important now” (Jenkins 2022). Finally, in the G20 Bali Leaders’ Declaration from November 2022, Heads of States and Government agreed that: “The use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible” (G20 Indonesia 2022, 1).

What do all these different statements have in common? They are all concerned with nuclear deterrence, its possible failure and the possibility of the renewed use of nuclear weapons. They all are based on a belief that under certain conditions, nuclear deterrence would be stable, even during wartime. In a masterful essay, Benjamin Wilson (2021) had traced the origins of “strategic stability” back to Keynesian macroeconomic techniques employed by Thomas Schelling (1958) “to frame deterrence as a stable system of dynamic adjustment” (Wilson 2019, 1). According to Schelling (1961, 723), “Mutual deterrence is considered the more stable, the less susceptible it is to political and technological events, information and misinformation, accidents, alarms, and mischief, that might upset it”. Schelling’s views would soon spread far and wide and affect US scholarly and policy discussions up until today. Wilson (2019, 2) remarks: “The history of arms-control debates after 1960 could be told largely as a set of arguments over policies that were praised or criticized for their allegedly stabilizing or destabilizing effects”.

In its essence, “strategic stability arises when two adversaries have a survivable second-strike nuclear capability, there are limited incentives to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict (crisis stability) and there are limited incentives to build up nuclear forces (arms-race stability)” (Claeys and Williams 2022, 139). The question then is: To what degree can and should strategic stability incentivize and strengthen the non-use of nuclear weapons in the 21^st century? This question is all the more relevant, for the concept has come under political and intellectual pressure for a number of reasons.

Conceptual Fuzziness

Acton (2013, 117) points out that proponents of strategic stability “have never actually been able to coalesce around a single definition” and that “governments, in particular, are guilty of using the term ‘strategic stability’ without definition or clear meaning” (Acton 2013, 118). While official US documents regularly refer to strategic stability in the narrower sense of nuclear crisis and arms race stability, particularly Russian officials have employed the term to describe political-military relations with both the United States and NATO, and with a view to nuclear, conventional, cyber, and space-related weaponry and behavior (Arbatov et al. 2010). Meanwhile, the Chinese perspective stresses “the traditional concept of strategic stability [being] based on a relationship of mutual nuclear vulnerability”, the latter allegedly being put in question by malign US strategic intentions (Zhao 2020, 69). Whether conceptual fuzziness “seriously detracts from the quality of debate on nuclear policy” (Acton 2013, 120) or actually allows exactly the necessary leeway that creative arms control diplomacy might need is one of the questions that future negotiators will have to answer.¹ At the moment, more serious impediments than diverging definitions hamper the further evolution of the concept.

Nuclear Multipolarity

Among the more serious challenges to strategic stability, an emerging system of nuclear multipolarity, i.e. a combination of multipolar great power rivalry, involving the United States, Russia and China; a reported Chinese nuclear buildup (Seligman 2022); and regional nuclear/non-nuclear rivalries are most often cited as undermining the concept (Rubin and Stulberg 2018). As a logical consequence, a concept stemming from the Cold War, developed for a unique bilateralism, would be “about as relevant today as the challenge of defending the Fulda Gap from advancing Soviet armor” (Acton 2013, 117). As a consequence of nuclear multipolarity and concurrent political interactions of nuclear dyads and triads, efforts to manage nuclear instabilities in the 21^st century face the difficult task of reflecting very different strategic cultures, postures, alliance dynamics and (partly missing) historical experiences (Zhao 2020).

Novel Technologies

Recent pace and scope of technological innovation has led to conclusions that humanity is experiencing a “fourth industrial revolution” (UNIDO 2019, 1). As with prior industrial revolutions, military applicability of these novel technologies – including enabling technologies with dual-use applicability – will lead to novel weapons systems, new military capabilities, strategies and doctrines (Schneider and Macdonald 2022). Chyba (2020, 153) offers three perspectives to analyze a technology’s potential to affect stability: “pace of advances in, and diffusion of […] technology; […] implications for deterrence and defense; and [its] potential for direct impact on crisis decision-making”. He concludes that “particularly enabling technologies”, such as artificial intelligence (AI), “resist arms control based on effective verification” (Chyba 2020, 163). A recent foresight study found “evidence of an ongoing arms race for emerging military technologies”, based on “the expected extent of technology trajectory alignment between the United States, Russia, and China” by 2040 as regards twelve key novel military technologies (Favaro, Renic, and Kühn 2022, 10). The challenge to strategic stability thus seems to stem from a difficult to disentangle interplay of rapid technological innovation with military applicability and political competition for military primacy and prestige.

Arms Control Crisis

If one accepts the notion of strategic stability being synonymous with US-Soviet/Russian nuclear arms control policies (Wilson 2021), then the festering crisis in bilateral arms control relations is as much a crisis of strategic stability. The reasons for the crisis of bilateral arms control have been well documented by recent scholarship (Krepon 2021) and include the erosion or absence of “a shared willingness to shield the bilateral process from political disruption, U.S. bipartisan support [for arms control], and cooperatively addressing the vertical diffusion of offensive and defensive missile capabilities” (Kühn 2021, 319). What is sometimes overlooked is the degree to which multilateral nonproliferation efforts and conventional agreements below the nuclear threshold have been negatively impacted by the crisis as well (Baldus, Müller, and Wunderlich 2021; Graef 2021). The consequences are such that bilateral arms control now rests entirely on a single remaining agreement: New START. Due to the 2023 Russian suspension, the Treaty is already in deep crisis. It will ultimately expire in February 2026. Whether strategic stability could remain relevant in the absence of formally negotiated and ratified limits is as much up for debate as are the potential future effects on arms race stability for both the US-Russian and US-Chinese dyads.

Persuasiveness of Norms

Finally, the Ukraine War and Russia’s offensive misuse of the defensive nuclear deterrence concept promise to put into question orthodox views of nuclear deterrence (Sechser and Fuhrmann 2017). The extent to which the Russian approach could potentially be replicated, for example by China against Taiwan, remains to be seen. In addition, the question comes up what contribution, if any, arms control played in preventing possible Russian nuclear use against Ukraine, should Moscow ever have seriously considered that option. Obviously, bilateral US-Russian agreements were never designed to address any such circumstances. Meanwhile, those nonproliferation agreements that were meant to guarantee Ukraine’s security, such as the Budapest Memorandum, were broken by Moscow. Therewith, one could conclude that neither bilateral nuclear arms control nor multilateral nuclear nonproliferation agreements have any direct stability relevance in the 21^st century beyond safeguarding stability between nuclear-armed powers and their client states (Waltz 1981). Meanwhile, the non-use or “taboo” norm (Tannenwald 2007) seems to have demonstrated its persuasiveness and relevance in the current crisis, as expounded by US official statements praising Chinese and Indian leaders for publicly rejecting the use or threat of use of nuclear arms in conjunction with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine (Woodruff 2022). The possible conclusions drawn by the rest of the world could be twofold: On the one hand, strategic stability could be viewed as an exclusive concept, reflective of a hierarchical and outdated world order that perpetuates “nuclear injustice” (Stärk and Kühn 2022). On the other hand, nuclear norms and approaches to rally around a set of responsible nuclear behavior standards could become to be seen as the more egalitarian and therewith perhaps more powerful tools for preventing nuclear use. How to marry seemingly “soft” norms and behavioral-based approaches with the material mechanisms of strategic stability might become one of the intellectual challenges of nuclear strategists of the 21^st century.

Adapting Strategic Stability

This special issue seeks to draw attention to some of these challenges to strategic stability and to novel ideas on how to deal with them cooperatively. It assembles a selection of international scholars and analysts that seek to address specifically how strategic stability could be adapted in the US–Russia and US–China relationships as well as in light of manifold technological innovations in the military sector.

In the first article, Sarah Bidgood addresses conceptual fuzziness in the US-Russian nuclear bilateralism. She argues that efforts to negotiate US-Russian bilateral arms control and risk reduction measures designed to advance strategic stability have become stymied as a result of negotiators lacking a common goal. Washington and Moscow should therefore start with a serious effort to reach a shared understanding of what strategic stability is and does as a means to its operationalization. Bidgood offers a two-phased approach to disambiguating the concept of bilateral US–Russia strategic stability-one that is informed by a philosophy of pragmatism and operationalized through interrelated processes including war gaming, backcasting and threatcasting. Its objective would be to aid both sides in disambiguating their conceptualization of strategic stability while prioritizing approaches that could ultimately strengthen its most desirable outcomes. Bidgood argues that even in a highly contested environment it is worth developing novel proposals in the interest of being prepared when the moment for renewed US-Russian arms control efforts arrives.

In the subsequent article focusing on novel technologies, Marina Favaro and Heather Williams use the ongoing war in Ukraine as a case study to identify how those technologies are being used in modern conflicts and the associated risks of escalation, potentially up to the use of nuclear weapons. They find that some emerging technologies gave Russia a false sense of supremacy in the lead-up to the war and largely failed to deliver Russia battlefield victories. According to Favaro and Williams, “it is not the technologies themselves that increase risks of escalation, but their impact on decisionmakers’ perceptions of the potential costs of offensive military operations and escalation”. In addition, they find limited evidence that emerging technologies had an escalatory or de-escalatory effect on the war. In order to strengthen strategic stability, they pledge for the inclusion of private sector actors that traditionally sit outside established arms control mechanisms. Addressing the challenge of emerging technologies, they argue, private companies need to be included in discussions and policy development around arms control and risk reduction.

In the third research article, Anna Nadibaidze and Nicolò Miotto argue that the impact of AI on strategic stability is what states make of it. They draw our attention to better understanding how policymakers of nuclear powers conceive of AI and its potential impacts and argue that the relationship between AI and strategic stability is not only determined by the technical nature of AI but also constructed by policymakers’ beliefs about these technologies and others’ intentions to use them. Applying the constructivist lens and analysing and comparing US and Russian official discourses, they investigate how decision-makers from both countries talk about military AI. Nadibaidze and Miotto conclude that the social context, characterized by distrust and feelings of competition, is reflected in their broader perspectives of strategic stability and leads them to perceive each other’s capabilities in threatening ways. In effect, US and Russian discourses fuel a cycle of misperceptions, unlikely to be resolved in the short term against the background of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Closing this special issue with a commentary highlighting the emerging condition of nuclear multipolarity, David Santoro zooms in on China. He makes the point that the United States and China do not have a nuclear arms control relationship, nor will they have one any time soon. After having ignored “nuclear China” for a long time, Washington today desperately wants to develop an arms control relationship with Beijing. Yet Beijing does not see any such effort as being in its national interests. Even though the prospects for a nuclear arms control breakthrough are poor in the foreseeable future, Santoro nonetheless sees a pathway for Washington to try and nudge Beijing towards nuclear arms control. While initially substantive work on arms control may take a back seat, a carefully crafted US approach on China would combine pressure and inducements to jumpstart a nuclear dialogue. Once that dialogue begins, substantive discussions on crisis management may be the initial focus. Santoro makes the case for strategic patience: “expecting too much, too soon is unlikely to yield results and a recipe for failure”.

Together, these four pieces highlight the immense, multidirectional pressure under which the concept of strategic stability has come in recent years. At the same time, all four offer new perspectives and even policy-relevant recommendations for dealing with the increased risk of instability and for strengthening arms control policies and dialogue. From a scholarly viewpoint, strategic stability remains an elusive concept; though, one that exactly because of its definitional vagueness allows for a fruitful variety of theoretical angles of investigation. More input on the issue by Chinese and Russian experts as well as from scholars from the Global South would certainly help to stimulate the debate about strategic stability.

As final words, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, who provided valuable comments and help to the authors of this special issue, Valeriia Gergiieva for help with the literature, the editors of J-PAND, who invited me to serve as a guest editor for this timely installment, as well as the German Federal Foreign Office and the MacArthur-funded project on “Rethinking Deterrence” for their support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Federal Foreign Office, Grant 'Research and Transfer Project Arms Control and Emerging Technologies (Phase II)'

Notes

¹ In a multi-perspective project, led by the Körber Foundation, participants from China, Europe, Russia, and the United States agreed in 2021 that “A shared understanding of strategic stability among great powers would be helpful, but as long as they can agree on shared concerns and as long as discussions on strategic stability result in concrete measures that would reduce the risk of military escalation and help disincentivize strategic first strikes, a mutually agreed definition is not mandatory” (Körber Foundation 2021, 1).