This past year, the United Kingdom released a seminal defense publication, The Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, in which the UK has signaled that a new era of strategic nuclear competition has begun, or at the very least, continued in a significant way. The publication, which serves as a strategic vision for the UK’s defense and security policy for the coming decade through 2030, puts forward a realignment of the UK’s nuclear force posture and use policy. Specifically, the country is abandoning previous limits to its stockpiles and expanding the acceptable use of nuclear forces to include emerging technologies that can have a “comparable impact” to other weapons of mass destruction. This shift in nuclear doctrine is representative of changing dynamics in global competition which is being magnified by advancements in emerging technologies such as cyber, artificial intelligence, ballistic missiles, and directed-energy weapons. These advancements, married to increasingly assertive military strategies, have created a new strategic paradigm in which destruction may no longer be mutual and the implications of which are only now being fully acknowledged.
Why New Strategies are Necessary
This shift in nuclear doctrine marks a recognition that the nature of international nuclear geopolitics has shifted. Advances in emerging technologies have forced the obsolescence of the traditionally accepted dogmas of nuclear policy. These technologies mean that countries will have to reevaluate their own nuclear posture as the effectiveness of their forces are increasingly contested and under threat. The precise nature of those threats is what makes emerging technologies such potent forces as they have a multi-pronged impact on a country’s nuclear policies that intermingle and magnify assertive military strategies. Simply put, emerging technologies can pose direct threats to a country’s nuclear forces and they can present sufficient threats in of themselves that rise to the level of nuclear response.
Impacts Emerging Technologies Have on Nuclear Doctrine
Each of the nine official and unofficial nuclear-armed countries have established nuclear doctrines that govern how they develop, maintain, deploy, utilize, and leverage their nuclear forces. Emerging technologies don’t simply have the potential to disrupt these established doctrines, they already have. The universe of these advancements can be bifurcated into software and hardware domains. In the software domain, advancements in cyber capabilities and artificial intelligence, among other technologies such as quantum computing, mean that a country’s nuclear forces are increasingly vulnerable. In the hardware domain, advancements in nuclear weapons systems, hypersonic ballistic missiles, drones, and directed-energy weapons have made it increasingly easier for countries to bypass traditional barriers to nuclear supremacy such as air defenses and monitoring systems such as satellites and radar. Given that the utility of a country’s nuclear arsenal is founded upon deterrence and operational capability, each of these domains independently have the potential to disrupt and upend the strategic balance. When operating in conjunction with one another and administered in an increasingly competitive and aggressive environment, however, the implications for nuclear security and global stability are magnified.
Advancements in the Software Domain
One of the most consequential advancements in technology has been the development and proliferation of advanced cyber capabilities and the nascent military applications of artificial intelligence. Cyber weapons and associated cyber espionage have made locating, tracking, and monitoring the capabilities and movements of a country’s nuclear arsenal far easier. So, counties such as Pakistan, China, and the UK that rely on “strategic ambiguity” and a mobile nuclear force as a measure of deterrence now have to contend with the fact that with the proliferation of cyber, the ambiguity of their nuclear posture is no longer as opaque as it once was, jeopardizing the safety of their forces. Additionally, cyber weapons can themselves target the command-and-control systems governing nuclear infrastructure (satellites, nuclear control systems, utility infrastructure, etc.) rendering a country’s arsenal vulnerable to being disabled, destroyed and/or sabotaged. The gravity of this fact was made infamous with the Stuxnet cyber-attack on Iranian nuclear centrifuges. Critically, cyber-attacks and intrusions provide invaluable data streams that can feed AI-enabled technology to develop predictive models that can augment all of the aforementioned capabilities cyber brings to bear along with a more sophisticated understanding of a country’s nuclear maneuvering and strategy.
Advancements in the Hardware Domain
While kinetic weapons fall under the traditional domain of warfare most war planners are accustomed to, the advent of hypersonic technology (ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, gliders, etc.), advancements in nuclear weapons systems, and directed-energy weapons, like their software counterparts, all signal a paradigm shift that requisites examination by nuclear powers. Advancements in hardware technology threaten accepted tenets of deterrence by injecting the potential for first strike advantage and force superiority. Countries such as Russia, for instance, have made a point of displaying advancements in hypersonic technology such as the Avangard glide vehicle which has the potential to evade air defenses and strike targets that would otherwise be denied using traditional hardware. This poses a strategic advantage in favor of countries with this technology. Furthermore, with the development of directed-energy weapons that have the capability to both disable and destroy traditional command and control infrastructure as well as augment air defenses, countries can no longer afford to accept that they will be able to either defend themselves or retaliate in the case of a nuclear engagement which is a fundamental violation of the principles that contribute to nuclear stability.
Influence of Competition and Military Strategy
In the context of emerging technologies, the critical feature that is heightening instability is that these advancements are being paired with increasingly belligerent military strategies. More than simply being paired, many of these emerging technologies are the physical manifestations of this context itself. In the case of Russia, for instance, advancements in ballistic missiles and nuclear weapon systems have their genesis in the country’s increasing hostility towards western powers that has been growing since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, as well as the country’s evolving deterrence strategy which is largely founded on raising the costs of a potential conflict beyond expected gains which requisites developing advanced threat capabilities.
The nature of global competition is not limited to Russia. Across the spectrum of nuclear-armed countries, rhetoric and strategic competition have proliferated which has led countries to undergo extensive research and development efforts to update their conventional and non-conventional arsenals. From Indian counterspace weapons capable of disrupting command and control capabilities critical to nuclear forces to Chinese AI-enabled weapon systems with the potential to provide a strategic advantage in future conflicts, aggression and competition permeate global strategy and create a feedback loop through which each successive technological advancement reinforces further need to advance strategic offensive and defensive capabilities. The byproduct of this level of technological investment and aggression is an ever-shifting goal post for what the nuclear balance of power is which comes at the expense of stability, security, and certainty. At any given moment, in this context, no country can afford to idly accept the efficacy of its nuclear umbrella.
Emerging Technologies As Weapons of Mass Destruction
With the emergence of advanced cyber weapons and the near unlimited potential of artificial intelligence, war planners have been developing scenarios and exercises that exploit the military applications of these technologies. This is critical because the influence emerging technologies have on nuclear doctrine are not limited to their impacts on a country’s nuclear arsenal, they extend to their military applications as standalone weapons themselves. While threats that rise to the level of a nuclear response are traditionally understood to be conventional or nonconventional attacks that significantly damage a country’s interests (military personnel, citizens, critical infrastructure, etc.), cyber has thus far been treated with an almost banal level of urgency given the implications of its use. The recent SolarWinds hack demonstrates the difficulties policy makers and military leaders have in responding to even the most overt and aggressive cyber operations. The hesitancy, or more accurately, the difficulty in responding to these threats is rooted in issues relating to attribution, proportional response, and the nature of cyber-attacks.
Cyber muddies the waters of conventional military response because that response is typically contingent on the assessment scope, damage, and consequence. With cyber, determining the scope of an attack is difficult and often a near impossibility to fully capture. Assessing the damage of an attack that cannot be counted by the number of casualties or wounded or by dollar amount of destruction is difficult enough without even recognizing the inability to assign value on the information that may have been compromised. The same impediments to determining the scope and damage of a cyber-attack are the same impediments to determining the consequences of an adversary’s cyber-attack. No two hacks are equal, and without a proper understanding of the implications of the original attack, which is never guaranteed and perhaps even unlikely, determining a response, proportional or otherwise is the present question modern defense strategists are struggling to answer.
All of the above are the reasons why cyber and artificial intelligence are so dangerous. Russia demonstrated the offensive capabilities of cyber during the Black Energy attacks that targeted Ukrainian utilities, the U.S. and Israel likewise demonstrated cyber’s potential with the Stuxnet attacks. Untethering a country from reliable water, electricity, and transportation has catastrophic potential. The fact that countries struggle with how to respond to cyber-attacks renders the traditional restraint on the use of weapons of mass destruction, proportional response, ineffective. In this environment, adversarial countries have an asymmetric cost benefit calculation to the employment of cyber weapons where cyber can be deployed and inflict catastrophic damage without clear expectations of reciprocity. Gains and benefits are understood but costs are not which can incentivize aggressive behavior by less risk-averse countries or countries operating in a hypervigilant environment, such as the one the world now finds itself in. This new reality was recognized by the UK in their new defense publication which explicitly notes the exploitation of this as a short-of-war strategy by Russia.
UK: The Country That Finally Looked Down
Taken together, emerging technologies and increasingly aggressive military strategies have created conditions whereby the traditional framework that guided nuclear doctrine is no longer tenable. Whether it is the United States or Pakistan or the UK, countries can no longer take for granted the security of their nuclear forces or their abilities to retaliate. Prevarication amidst increasingly aggressive and sophisticated cyber-attacks has dramatically shifted the attack surface available for adversarial exploitation and shifted the strategic balance to bias towards countries that are bold in cyber operations. In this new strategic environment where the traditional nuclear umbrella is compromised, devoid of mutual assurance and clear expectations, the likely result will be a period of significant insecurity, competition, and ultimately, dangerous instability.
The rules of the game have changed, and it appears as if the UK’s decision to augment their force posture and expand their nuclear use policy to include threats from emerging technologies is a recognition of that fact. The new strategies being adopted by the UK are reflective of a realization of the world as it is, not as it was. Like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and continuing apace until the moment he looks down, the moment these emerging technologies were introduced, traditional nuclear doctrine ran off the cliff. The UK was just among the first to look down and realize it. Critically, this shift in the UK’s nuclear doctrine is a signal to other nuclear-armed countries which will force a reexamination of their own indigenous nuclear posture and the inevitable realization that emerging technologies are an existential threat to the protection they enjoyed under the former nuclear environment. They too are at the mercy of gravity, they just haven’t all looked down yet.
The Strategic Tribune 