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(Crosspost from CredibleDefense)
Absent a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, and assuming Putin or his appointed successor remain in power in Russia in the medium-long term, it seems unlikely that sanctions on Russia will be lifted any time soon, not least because Europe's transition to LNG over piped gas will be well underway by then and economic pressure for a relations-reset will be relatively muted. Under this "North Korea" scenario, Russia is envisaged to remain a hostile actor to the West and to Europe especially, in the domains such as nuclear sabre-rattling, cyberwarfare, political influence, funding of terrorism, and so on.
What should the West's response be to this new threat on its doorstep? One obvious possibility would be to accelerate and strengthen the NATO missile defense program. While the kinetics of a 99%+ intercept rate remain extremely challenging, a limited missile defense shield capable of reliably intercepting a small number of targets is vastly more technologically viable now than in Reagan's era. Indeed, the fundamentals of such capabilities are arguably already in place, with Aegis Ashore batteries in Romania and Poland (soon to become operational), THAAD batteries are active in Turkey, and Patriot systems in Germany, Spain, Greece, Poland, Romania, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Slovakia. While there has been persistent concern among NATO powers that a missile defense system would risk antagonising Russia, the changing geopolitical environment means that many European governments may be politically and financially willing to commit to accelerating the shield.
What of developments in hypersonics and decoy tech? While these do pose challenges, in the case of Russia at least, the Ukraine war suggests that many of their vaunted capabilities may be mere vaporware, or at least perform well below claimed performance measures. Moreover, other technological developments in fields like AI have the potential to make reliable interception more feasible.
What would the point of all this be? In addition to providing NATO with a better way to prevent nuclear bullying by Russia of its neighbours, and to defend against rogue international actors, we might reasonably hope to present Russia with a painful dilemma much like that faced by the Soviet Union in the light of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative: either commit to an arms race that it can ill afford, or risk its nuclear capabilities being de-fanged by a more technologically-advanced West. If anything, Russia's current position is worse than that of the Soviet Union in this regard, given its relatively weaker scientific and industrial base and etiolated conventional forces. And whereas Reagan's SDI was mostly pie-in-the-sky thinking in the 1980s, contemporary missile defense boasts impressive and growing capabilities.
Of course, absent any miracle breakthroughs, it remains unlikely that any missile defense shield in the near- or medium-term would be able to withstand a massed nuclear strike involving hundreds or even thousands of warheads. However, the old principles of mutually assured destruction mean that this is not the most pressing nuclear threat that is faced by the West today. Instead, we face the risk of an increasingly isolated, weakened, and aggressive Russia using nuclear weapons in a more restricted capacity to gain battlefield advantages or to coerce its neighbours. Even a limited shield would be useful in combating these threats, and may help contribute in the longer-term to the downfall of Russia's current regime.
How would China behave in this scenario? I can't imagine them sitting still and letting the US-led block alone transcend the constraints of MAD, but at the same time it doesn't seem to me like their R&D capabilities are quite on the level to keep up and join the newly forming circle of "have nukes, but can't be nuked" powers. Perhaps the right play for a US that has decided that the destruction of Russia is an overwhelming priority would then be to offer China unlimited participation in any interception technology it develops and deploys in return for its acquiescence, but I don't know if there is political appetite for such a bold trade.
On that matter, we really shouldn't forget that game theory demands precommitting to nuke your opponent before he makes himself unnukable. I'm increasingly finding myself wishing that we could just get one nuke each on DC and Moscow followed by a miraculous detente, to skim off some of the hubristic cream on top and make people on both sides realise how much they have postured themselves into feeling compelled to wager for
skubUkraine.China is one of only two countries (the other being India) that have formally committed to a no-first-use policy. They also have enough ICBMs that they wouldn't need to worry about a missile defence system depriving them of their nuclear deterrent: even if it boasted high intercept rates, any near-term system would be unable to reliably intercept hundreds of simultaneous launches.
Doesn't Russia still have many more nuclear warheads + ICBMs than China, so a system that could negate the Russian nuclear deterrent would necessarily either automatically or in a matter of a few months of logisticking also negate the Chinese one?
I'm not sure that "formal commitments" of this type are worth anything in the context of planet-spanning life-or-death conflicts, and either way I'm not sure if this is relevant: the subtree of the game we're looking at would involve China doing something to assert its interests in its near abroad, followed by a conventional US intervention against it which fails to be decisive, followed by US threats or usage of nukes (just as the US used nukes when it didn't want to pay the price for conventionally deciding the Pacific Theatre of WWII). It matters all the way up the tree whether China then can successfully threaten or enact nuclear retaliation or not.
Absolutely - the deterrent effect of a missile shield isn't to protect against a general nuclear war in which Russia, China, or the US decides to hit the big red button. Given the constraints of MAD, I'd like to think that no state would rationally launch a first strike at scale. The point of the shield is to prevent countries engaging in low-level nuclear bullying, or attempts to use nuclear weapons to gain a limited battlefield advantage. Existing MAD doctrine doesn't really cover these kinds of contingency: the US isn't going to nuke Moscow just because Russia uses a battlefield nuke against a Ukrainian airbase.
I'm having trouble imagining a missile shield that would work against tactical nukes but not substantially reduce the effectivity of a launch-all volley. If your nukes are counted in the thousands, having to launch 10 instead of 1 against a battlefield target seems to be merely a cost issue if you know you need to saturate the defenses. Also, the metropole may be much easier to defend than any contested frontline (because of longer warning times, better supply lines and better radar coverage), so a system which intercepts 90% of incomings on the front might well intercept 99% near the capital, thus being a real threat to "full-volley" MAD too.
I would hope, but who knows. Maybe they would be tempted to at least nuke a Russian airbase, and then who knows where it goes from there. I really hope that the people who are calling the shots on our side are not themselves falling to the sentiments that they are tactically whipping up in the general population.
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