Image: iStock / Elisank79

REDUCING OR EXPLOITING RISK? VARIETIES OF US NUCLEAR
THOUGHT AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR NORTHEAST ASIA

Van Jackson
Prepared for the

Project on Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use
in Northeast Asia (NU-NEA)
Co-sponsored by
The Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University (RECNA),
The Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, and
The Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (APLN)
with cooperation ofPanel on Peace and Security of Northeast Asia
Additional funding by the MacArthur Foundation

February 28, 2022
Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use in Northeast Asia (NU-NEA), Project Year 1

1About the Author
Van Jackson is a professor of International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, as
well as a distinguished fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, and a senior associate
fellow with APLN. He is the author of two books on US-North Korea relations, as well as theforthcoming book, Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace(Yale University Press). Before becoming a scholar, Van served in several policy and strategy
positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during the Obama administration. Research
for this paper received additional support from the Federation of American Scientists“Conditions for US-ROK Conventional Arms Reduction” project sponsored by the Korea
Foundation.

Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use in Northeast Asia (NU-NEA), Project Year 12

Abstract
This paper argues that there is no monolithic “United States perspective” when it comes totheories of nuclear stability, either structurally or during a crisis. Instead, the propensity ofAmerican policymakers to use or invest in nuclear weapons is heavily conditioned by theirpolitical and ideological orientation. There has always been a rough ideological divide between
nuclear hawks (those tending to favor military coercion) and doves (those generally opposing
signaling threats of force) in the United States, but the past several decades have seen morediversity in the types of views and preferences expressed in policy circles about strategic stability
and the (dis)utility of nuclear weapons. This paper categorizes the various US perspectives on
nuclear weapons as “arms-controllers,” who seek to reduce risks to strategic stability and viewadvanced conventional weapons as heightening the risks of nuclear use, “nuclear traditionalists,”
who accept the logic of mutually assured destruction, “nuclear primacists,” who believe stability
derives from nuclear superiority, escalation dominance, and the willingness to launch damagelimiting nuclear first-strikes, and “future-of-war” strategists, who de-center the role of nuclear
weapons in US strategy in favor of a focus on precision-guided conventional munitions anddelivery systems. These categorical distinctions, and which group holds the attention ofpolicymakers, matters. The scope for US nuclear weapons use—and the propensity to engage inactions that trigger adversary nuclear considerations—narrows and widens depending on whose
logic and preferences prevail both over time and in moments of crisis or shock.
Keywords: United States, Nuclear Strategy, Nuclear Use, Northeast Asia, Biden Administration

Introduction
This paper argues that there is no monolithic “United States perspective” on nuclear weapons inNortheast Asia. Instead, the propensity of US policymakers to use nuclear weapons is heavily
conditioned by their political and ideological orientation. Although this may seem obvious, itmeans that the US response to change—whether induced by military aggression, shifts inadversary nuclear policy, or trends in conventional weapons technology—depends substantiallyon the internalized causal beliefs about stability of those in power at the time of a decisionbecause events will be interpreted differently by different constituencies within the US policy
community.
Although there has always been a rough ideological divide between nuclear hawks (thosetending to favor military action) and doves (those generally opposing the use of force) in the
United States, the past several decades have seen more diversity in the types of views andpreferences expressed in policy circles about strategic stability and the (dis)utility of nuclear
weapons. Arms-controllers, who are found almost entirely in the Democratic Party today, seek to
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3

reduce risks to strategic stability and view advanced conventional weapons as heightening therisks of nuclear use. Nuclear traditionalists exist in both major political parties and accept thelogic of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Nuclear primacists, who are located solely within
the Republican Party, believe stability derives from nuclear superiority, escalation dominance,
and the willingness to launch damage-limiting nuclear first-strikes. And future-of-war (FoW)
strategists, a trans-partisan group, de-center the role of nuclear weapons in US strategy in favorof a focus on precision-guided conventional munitions and delivery systems. These categoricaldistinctions matter because the scope for US nuclear weapons use—and the propensity to engage
in actions that trigger adversary nuclear weapons use—narrows and widens depending on whose
logic and preferences prevail in moments of crisis or shock.
The remainder of this paper has three parts. The first briefly situates contemporary perspectives
about nuclear weapons in the longer US nuclear history in Northeast Asia. The second outlines
four schools of thought comprising the US nuclear policy epistemic community along several
dimensions. The third part discusses how these cleavages within the US policy milieu might
affect US nuclear and related weapons use in Northeast Asia by examining their intersection withthree different pathways to potential nuclear use—a North Korean atmospheric nuclear test, ally
nuclear near-proliferation, and limited conventional war gone wrong.

The Arc of US Nuclear History in Northeast Asia
For most of the Cold War, when nuclear weapons were central to US strategic thinking,Northeast Asia was secondary to the European theater. The United States threatened nuclearweapons use during the Korean War.1 The Eisenhower administration contemplated nuclear use
in the Quemoy-Matsu crises with China during the 1950s.2 And the Kennedy administrationconsidered preventive strikes targeting key Chinese facilities into the 1960s.3 Throughout theCold War, moreover, the United States maintained forward-positioned nuclear weapons in the
Republic of Korea (ROK) and via the regular deployment of nuclear-armed submarines.
Nevertheless, US nuclear strategy—force structure, posture, and doctrine—wasdisproportionately driven by concerns with either deterrence or damage limitation against theSoviet Union in conflicts primarily imagined in Europe.
That geographic focus gave way somewhat in the 1980s as the US Navy championed a maritime
strategy that elevated the importance of the Pacific and embraced the concept of horizontal
escalation (the geographical expansion of conflict).4 The Able Archer nuclear war scare in 1983,
in which a NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) command post simulation of conflict
escalation was interpreted as potentially the build-up to a real attack by the Soviet Union, was an
1

Roger Dingman, “Atomic Diplomacy During the Korean War,” International Security Vol. 13, no. 3 (1988), pp. 5091.
2
H.W. Brands, “Testing Massive Retaliation: Credibility and Crisis Management in the Taiwan Strait,” International
Security Vol. 12, no. 4 (1988), pp. 124-151.
3
Lyle Goldstein, “When China Was a ‘Rogue State’: The Impact of China’s Nuclear Weapons Program on US-China
Relations During the 1960s,” Journal of Contemporary China Vol. 12, no. 37 (2003), pp. 739-64.
4
Jeffrey Record, “Jousting with Unreality: Reagan’s Military Strategy,” International Security Vol. 8, no. 3(1983/84), pp. 3-18

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idiosyncratic event, but it arose after more than a year of widespread concerns with growing
crisis instability risks as a result of the Reagan administration’s arms buildups—including in
mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and ballistic missile defenses—combined withan expanding forward military posture and increased military exercise tempo. Horizontal
escalation as an approach to deterrence further heightened the perceived danger of this era
because of its premise—if conflict erupted in the Middle East or Europe, the United States would
deliberately expand the conflict to the Pacific in order to impose a multifront war on Soviet
forces.5 By design, a conventional war anywhere could have meant nuclear war in Northeast
Asia.
The Reagan era was a critical juncture in American nuclear thinking in two ways. Many defense
experts at the time thought Reagan’s strategy was gratuitously expensive and risky, and without
commensurate benefit to justify the risks and costs.6 In spite of this, the Cold War ended
favorably for the United States; the superpower seemingly paid no geopolitical price for the
defense decisions of the 1980s. Consequently, Republicans walked away from the Cold War
rejecting some of the core judgments formulated in security studies about the limits of nuclear
coercion, believing instead that it was the US willingness to out-arms race the Soviets and put
forward pressure on Soviet military positions that won the Cold War.7 Nuclear and conventional
military superiority became articles of faith in the post-Cold War era among Republicans, which
also strengthened a corollary belief that arms control and international institutions were harmful
restraints on US power, and that US power alone could guarantee stability.8
The second way the Reagan era proved pivotal, however, was as a segue into the Revolution in
Military Affairs (RMA). The Eisenhower administration’s decision to adopt a doctrine ofmassive nuclear retaliation in the 1950s used the then-new technology of nuclear weapons tooffset Soviet conventional superiority in European ground forces.9 As Soviets began to reachnuclear parity with the United States, the Pentagon surged investments in data processing,ballistic rocket technology, and Global Positioning System technology beginning in the 1970s.10
The non-nuclear precision-guided munitions (PGMs) capability that resulted in the 1980s offset
the Soviets’ nuclear parity to ensure the US military retained a favorable edge in the global
balance of forces. Many US defense strategists saw the use of PGMs to quickly and decisively
rollback Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990/1991 as a transformation of warfare.
Believing an RMA had begun, a cadre of defense intellectuals and practitioners began planning

5

Joshua Epstein, “Horizontal Escalation: Sour Notes on a Recurrent Theme,” International Security Vol. 8, no. 3(1983-84), pp. 19-31.
6
Record, “Jousting with Unreality.” See also Fareed Zakaria, “The Reagan Strategy of Containment,” Political
Science Quarterly Vol. 105, no. 3 (1990), pp. 373-95.
7
See especially, Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War
Order (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).
8This forms part of the catechism of neoconservatism. Justin Vaisse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a
Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
9
Van Jackson, “Superiority at Any Price? Political Consequences of the First Offset Strategy,” War on the Rocks(October 30, 2014), https://warontherocks.com/2014/10/superiority-at-any-price-political-consequences-of-thefirst-offset-strategy/
10
William J. Perry, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2015).

Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use in Northeast Asia (NU-NEA), Project Year 15and advocating for a future of war that paid little attention to nuclear weapons in favor of
conventional PGMs.11
In the George W. Bush administration, two intellectual currents were thus driving US nuclear
and defense policy. On the one hand, Bush’s Nuclear Posture Review and his nuclear specialists
sought a massive expansion in ballistic missile defenses, non-strategic low-yield nuclear
weapons, and the preservation of nuclear superiority vis-à-vis Russia. They were also concerned
about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) as a nascent “rogue” nuclear state,and how China’s burgeoning anti-satellite (ASAT) capability, demonstrated in 2007, mightundermine US escalation dominance.12 On the other hand, the Pentagon simultaneously housed
strategists working out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of Net
Assessment who were focused not on nuclear weapons but rather preserving a favorable
conventional military balance as China’s military modernization continued to grow. 13
So when Barack Obama ascended to the presidency in 2009, he inherited a defense establishmentthat had already locked into multi-year investments in PGMs and autonomous weapons systems
as the “future of war,” but also large commitments to ballistic missile defense given the growing
ballistic missile capabilities of the DPRK and China. Although Obama’s “Global Zero” vision ofa world without nuclear weapons de-centered nuclear weapons in US strategy, it was underminedby his administration’s reliance on extended nuclear deterrence commitments to Japan and the
ROK as an expedient preventing horizontal nuclear proliferation to allies.

Varieties of US Nuclear Thought
Disagreement about US nuclear policy in Washington is not new. In the past decade though,diverging perspectives have sharpened to the point that there are now at least four competing
schools of thought about nuclear strategy. What these intellectual camps believe and prioritize,even more than the region itself, is the best analytical entry point for understanding likely US
decisions and sensibilities regarding specific nuclear concerns affecting Northeast Asia.
Although there are avatars in the real world who faithfully hold the views of each of these four
camps, outlined in the table below, many others in the US national security establishment are
hybrids of these categories, which should be understood as ideal types. As with Weberian idealtype schemas generally, what makes these categories useful is that the closer a given
presidency’s intellectual makeup hews to a given school of thought, the easier it will be to
anticipate how they would respond to shifts in Northeast Asia’s security environment. The tablebelow, and the text that follows, identifies and characterizes these four “camps” of US nuclear
thought.

11

For an uncritical historiography of this view, see Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew
Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
12David McDonough, “The ‘New Triad’ of the Bush Administration: Counterproliferation and Escalation Dominancein US Nuclear Strategy,” International Journal Vol. 59, no. 3 (2004), pp. 613-634.
13
See especially Nina Silove, "The Pivot before the Pivot: US Strategy to Preserve the Power Balance inAsia,” International Security Vol. 40, no. 4 (2016), pp. 45-88.

Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use in Northeast Asia (NU-NEA), Project Year 1

6Varieties of US Nuclear Thought

Politicalalignment

Theory ofstability

Arms
controllers

Future-of-war
strategists

Nuclearprimacists

Nucleartraditionalists

Democratic
Party

Transpartisan

Republican Party

Transpartisan

Risk
mitigation

Fighting
conventional
wars in the
nuclear shadow

Escalation
dominance,
brinkmanship

Secure second strike,mutually assured
destruction

Arms control orarms buildup?

Arms control

ConventionalbuildupConventional andnuclear buildup

Nuclear buildup

Can nuclear
wars be won?

No

Maybe

Yes

No

Ally nuclear
proliferation

Destabilizing

Unnecessary

Potentially useful

Unnecessary

No-first use
policyYes

Agnostic

No

Agnostic

Missile defense
and hypersonic
weapons

Increase
nuclear risk

Substitute fornuclear risk

Increase stability if
you retain
superiority

Only impact stability
if they alter mutual
vulnerability

Possibilities fornuclear use

FewestModerate

Greatest

Moderate

Limits nuclear
signaling,
expands
strategic
stability,
reducedscope fordiscrimination
problems

Accepts
entanglement
risks, heightens
discrimination
problems

First-strikecounterforce
posture, heightens
discrimination
problems

Commitment traps,
heavy nuclear
signaling, accepts
discrimination
problems

Why

Arms Controllers
Arms controllers believe nuclear wars cannot be won in any meaningful way and prioritize
managing and reducing—not exploiting—risks to strategic stability (crisis and arms-racingstability). As such, arms-controllers worry about nuclear accidents and inadvertent escalation,
aver nuclear signaling as a means of coercion whenever possible, view proliferation as
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destabilizing, seek international agreements to impose nuclear restraints, and are conscientious
about pressures that might lead others to resort to nuclear first use.14 Extending this perspective
to non-nuclear weapons systems, arms controllers have been the primary constituency concernedwith how ballistic missile defenses can undermine strategic stability, why new domains likecyberspace create entanglement risks with nuclear command and control, and why hypersonicglide vehicles heighten nuclear first-use pressures (because of the inability for the target todefend against a missile that could have a nuclear warhead).15 Although both Democratic andRepublican presidencies have concluded arms control agreements in the past, arms controllers
now reside almost entirely within the Democratic Party; the evolution of the Republican Party
during the Trump years has eliminated any notable experts who think about nuclear weapons theway arms-controllers do. Given their commitment to mitigating risk, the scope for nuclear
weapons-use for any reason is narrowest when arms controllers predominate in the US
government.

Nuclear Traditionalists
Nuclear traditionalists accept the logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD), believing in thegenerally stabilizing benefits of a reliable, modern US nuclear arsenal. Although the Cold War
showed that US policymakers constantly sought ways to escape vulnerability to Soviet firststrikes,16 it also birthed a widely held conventional wisdom that a secure second-strikecapability—assured retaliation—was sufficient to deter nuclear attacks in most instances. The
paradox of nuclear traditionalists’ beliefs is the paradox of deterrence reasoning. They believe
nuclear wars are not generally worth fighting, and that strategic stability creates permissive space
to pursue military operations and coercive diplomacy without worrying about nuclear war. At thesame time, they also rely on nuclear signaling about the United States’ willingness to use nuclear
weapons to induce adversary restraint and reassure allies who might be tempted to pursue theirown nuclear weapons if they deemed the US extended nuclear deterrence commitment
unreliable. Nuclear traditionalists, found in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, support
nuclear modernization investments and are agnostic about adjacent technology areas like missile
defenses and hypersonic glide vehicles. Acknowledging that mutual vulnerability is a soundbasis for stability necessarily means that non-nuclear weapons will matter only to the extent theyenhance or undermine the ability for either the United States or its adversaries to retain anassured retaliation capability. There is some scope for nuclear-weapons use in the traditionalists’worldview, both out of misperception—because of their reliance on extended nuclear deterrence
commitments and nuclear signaling—and because their belief in the stability-instability paradox
incentivizes them to, paradoxically, engage in behavior that risks escalating into a conflict spiral.

14

For the clearest articulation of this view, see Robert Jervis, “Arms Control, Stability, and Causes of War,” Political
Science Quarterly Vol. 108, no. 2 (1993), pp. 239-253.
15 See, for example, James Acton, “Escalation Through Entanglement: How the Vulnerability of Command-andControl Systems Raises the Risks of an Inadvertent Nuclear War,” International Security Vol. 43, no. 1 (2018), pp.
56-99.
16 Francis Gavin, “Rethinking the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy,” Texas National Security
Review Vol. 2, no. 1 (2018), pp. 74-100.

Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use in Northeast Asia (NU-NEA), Project Year 1

8Future-of War (FoW) Strategists
A category of defense intellectuals and practitioners that did not exist during the Cold War is the
FoW strategists. Nurtured by the long-range planning of the Office of Net Assessment in thePentagon, their attitude toward nuclear weapons derives from a vision of how wars will befought in the future.17 FoW strategists are far from advocates of nuclear disarmament. Instead,they simply de-center the role of nuclear weapons by taking as a starting point that the stabilityinstability paradox holds, meaning that future wars will need to be fought with conventional andemerging weapons systems within the shadow of nuclear war.18 Although they are agnostic about
nuclear modernization and see nuclear weapons as insufficient for anyone’s security, FoW
strategists believe in retaining what they describe as America’s “military-technical edge,”prioritizing a conventional arms buildup in PGMs (specifically ballistic missile defense, robotics,
hypersonic glide vehicles, rail gun, directed energy weapons, and intermediate-range groundlaunched cruise missiles).19 FoW strategists are a transpartisan grouping that dominated defense
strategy during the Obama administration.20 FoW strategists are less likely than traditionalists toresort to nuclear signaling and believe that conventional military superiority should be adequate
to reassure allies worried about US extended deterrence commitments. But there is still scope fornuclear use in this view because of entanglement risks with conventional weapons systems.
PGMs, especially hypersonic glide vehicles, may undermine crisis stability by heightening
adversary first-use pressures.21 PGMs also pose a discrimination problem for nuclear-armed
adversaries who may not be able to discern whether US missiles targeting them have nuclear
warheads.

Nuclear Primacists
Modern nuclear primacists represent an evolution of more assertive beliefs about the utility of
nuclear weapons coming out of Reagan-era triumphalism. They exercised substantial influence
over both George W. Bush’s and Trump’s nuclear policies, and today they exist entirely within
the Republican Party. Believing that nuclear wars are won by suffering fewer casualties and lessdamage than one’s enemy, nuclear primacists consistently argue that stability is most likely the
result of US escalation dominance and a willingness to engage in brinkmanship.22 Consequently,
nuclear primacists seek cutting-edge conventional and nuclear modernization investments inorder to implement damage-limitation strategies involving counterforce strikes against adversary
weapons systems and infrastructure. They are also proponents of nuclear signaling and evenlimited nuclear use on the grounds that it has a deterrent effect, which is why they support
17 See especially Robert Work and Shawn Brimley, 20YY: Preparing for War in the Robotic Age (Washington, DC:

Center for a New American Security, 2014).
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid; Michele Flournoy, “America’s Military Risks Losing Its Military Edge,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2021),
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-04-20/flournoy-americas-military-risks-losing-its-edge
20 James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (New York:
Penguin Random House, 2012).
21
Joshua Pollack, “Boost-glide Weapons and US-China Strategic Stability,” The Nonproliferation Review Vol. 22, no.
2 (2015), pp. 155-164; Acton, “Escalation Through Entanglement.”
22 For representative text of this view that also summarizes the relevant literature espousing the same, see
Matthew Kroenig, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2018).

Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use in Northeast Asia (NU-NEA), Project Year 1

9development and deployment of low-yield, non-strategic nuclear weapons.23 Also indicative of
their heavy reliance on nuclear weapons, the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review stated the UnitedStates would resume nuclear testing after a multi-decade moratorium if there were “geopoliticalchallenges,”24 which then-Secretary James Mattis elaborated meant “the emergence of new
adversaries, expansion of adversary nuclear forces, changes in adversary strategy and doctrine,
new alignments among adversaries, and the further proliferation of nuclear weapons.”25 Nuclear
primacists additionally embrace ambiguity regarding the United States’ willingness to resort tonuclear first-use. Some nuclear primacists have even advocated for ally nuclear proliferation; aslong as ally proliferation does not undermine US nuclear superiority, there is no logical basis fornuclear primacists to oppose it. The primacists’ scope for nuclear weapons use—deliberate,
inadvertent, or incidental—is much higher than for the other nuclear worldviews outlined here.
The reason is that the primacists’ underlying theory of stability centers on exploiting nuclear
weapons in various ways rather than restraining them or appealing to alternative tools ofstatecraft.

Northeast Asian Contingencies and Pathways to Nuclear Use
This section thinks through the degree and specific forms of nuclear risk that arise from how
these individual schools of thought would most likely respond to different stress-testing
scenarios in Northeast Asia: Japanese and South Korean nuclear near-proliferation, a North
Korean atmospheric nuclear test, and a limited war gone wrong. All three of these scenarios havebeen the basis of nuclear threat-making in the past whereas other forms of signaling (such as
underground nuclear tests or ICBM tests) have a track record of occurring without incident.
Although Russia generally informs all four ways of thinking about nuclear weapons, Russia is
not considered here because of the exceedingly low plausibility of Russia playing a role in a
nuclear Northeast Asia pathway.26 The thumbnails below are not meant to be comprehensive
scenarios but rather descriptions of pathways to US nuclear use that are plausible and relevant.
Most importantly, they help illustrate how the differences among nuclear camps can affect the
US response to events in Northeast Asia. They focus disproportionately on the DPRK on thepresumption that the specific hinge points in a Sino-centric nuclear scenario are the same as in a
DPRK nuclear pathway—coercion in response to ally nuclear near-proliferation, atmosphericnuclear testing, and coercive nuclear escalation.

23 Geoff Brumfiel, “Trump Administration Begins Production of New Nuclear Weapon,” NPR (January 28, 2019),

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/28/689510716/trump-administration-begins-production-of-a-new-nuclear-weapon
24
The National Defense Strategy and the Nuclear Posture Review,” Committee on Armed Services, House ofRepresentatives (February 6, 2018), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-115hhrg28970/pdf/CHRG115hhrg28970.pdf, p. 77.
25 Ibid.
26 On Russia’s marginal relevance to Northeast Asian geopolitics for the United States, see especially Eugene
Rumer, Richard Sokolsky, and Aleksandar Vladicic, Russia in the Asia-Pacific: Less Than Meets The Eye (Washington,
DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2020), https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/09/03/russia-inasia-pacific-less-than-meets-eye-pub-82614

Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use in Northeast Asia (NU-NEA), Project Year 1

10Atmospheric Nuclear Test
In the fall of 2017, North Korean diplomats threatened to conduct an atmospheric nuclear test
over the Pacific.27 The threat followed a large underground nuclear test it conducted on
September 3, the regime’s sixth. Like past tests, it simultaneously served to advance its nuclear
program technically while also serving as a political signal of its defiance of US threats.
Although the atmospheric nuclear test never took place, it remains an option for the North. How
would the United States respond? In 2017, former US officials like Admiral Dennis Blair—
President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence—pushed for a large-scale bombing
campaign against all DPRK nuclear and missile facilities if Kim Jong Un followed through on
testing.28
The argument that a nuclear test of any kind should warrant a military offensive against the
DPRK is unique to the nuclear primacist worldview. Should the DPRK proceed with anatmospheric test in the future, especially during a crisis, the United States may respond with nonnuclear strikes that push the DPRK into nuclear first use either for reasons of “use or lose” or outof hope that escalating to nuclear use might deter further US attacks—if, that is, the dominantvoices in that US administration are nuclear primacists. FoW strategists and nuclear
traditionalists, however, would not necessarily see value in conducting offensive counterforce
operations in response to a non-violent test of nuclear technology. Because an atmosphericnuclear test would provide a greater degree of certainty about the DPRK’s ability to deliver anuclear warhead attack with a multiple stage rocket, the essentially rational posture of FoW
strategists and traditionalists would augur refraining from violence. Both, however, would see
value in military signaling (with conventional weapons for strategists and with nuclear-capable
assets for traditionalists) as a means of demonstrating both US resolve and superior capability.
The arms-controlling perspective, concerned as it is with risk management, might see a test as an
impetus for reinvigorated nuclear diplomacy, though it too may feel compelled to respond withmilitary signaling as a warning against further provocation.

Ally Near-Proliferation
Japan and the ROK have both positioned their national nuclear capacities and supporting military
infrastructure in such a way that either could develop its own nuclear weapons in a reasonably
short time frame.29 Proponents of nuclear weapons in both countries relate their rhetoric about
the possibility of going nuclear to perceptions of US unreliability and the fear of US
abandonment. Although US policymakers have worked with both governments to advance a
policy of extended nuclear deterrence as a way of foreclosing their perceived need for an
independent nuclear capability, the waning credibility of extended deterrence commitments are
27 Hyonhee Shin and Linda Sieg, “A North Korea Nuclear Test Over the Pacific? Logical, Terrifying,” Reuters(September 22, 2017), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-atmospheric-test/a-north-koreanuclear-test-over-the-pacific-logical-terrifying-idUSKCN1BX0W5
28 Dennis Blair, “Chairman’s Message: Trump’s Trip to Asia and Fundamentals to Consider in a High-Stakes
Environment,” Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA (November 6, 2017), https://spfusa.org/chairmansmessage/chairmans-message-trumps-trip-asia-fundamentals-consider-high-stakes-environment/
29
How quickly either could do this is a matter of some debate, but in both cases they are considered latent nuclear
powers, meaning less than a year. On the concept of nuclear latency, See Tristan Volpe, “Atomic Leverage:
Compellence with Nuclear Latency,” Security Studies Vol. 26, no. 3 (2017), pp. 517-44.

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11not the only source of nuclear aspiration—the perception in both governments that extended
deterrence is askew of the actual threats they face has also given rise to their respective nuclear
latency positioning.30 The period of greatest danger from ally proliferation is arguably during thewindow before either country has an operational nuclear capability but after geopolitical rivals
have concluded they are going nuclear. Although ally proliferation would not directly trigger US
nuclear use, how the DPRK or China reacts could.31 Nuclear adversaries have heightened
strategic incentives to conduct preventive attacks against non-nuclear rivals as they move closer
to developing nuclear weapons.32 This explains Israel’s attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981,
the US-Israeli attack on Syria’s nuclear reactor construction in 2007,33 and America’s posture
toward the DPRK since the 1990s.
Prior to conducting preventive non-nuclear strikes, the DPRK could resort to an atmosphericnuclear test as a coercive signal aimed at convincing either US ally from proceeding with
nuclearization; in addition to the threat of escalation, a high-altitude nuclear burst’s
electromagnetic pulse risks direct damage to electronic-reliant infrastructure. If that fails to deter
further ally proliferation, or if DPRK officials determine they would prefer to retain the strategic
surprise of a preventive attack, then the DPRK or China could conduct preventive strikes orcovert operations with little forewarning, making it a decisive point of escalation. The question is
how the United States would respond.
US nuclear traditionalists would feel compelled to redouble the visibility and centrality of the US
extended nuclear deterrence commitment, leading to heightened nuclear alert levels, breaking the
US moratorium on nuclear testing, and the deployment of nuclear-capable assets in and around
Japan and the ROK. Arms controllers would either adopt the same kind of nuclear signaling
decisions as traditionalists (because of the unique pressures of the situation) or consider
abandoning allies already on the path to nuclearization, the upshot being that if arms controllers
broke toward decoupling rather than nuclear coercion, it would be part of substantial efforts
aimed at negotiating nuclear restraints. FoW strategists would at least consider conventional
retaliatory operations aimed at “imposing costs” on China/the DPRK (depending on who
launched the attack). This would lead the DPRK/China to counter-retaliatory targeting of US or
ally forces in the area.34 Nuclear primacists, on the other hand, might be led to conduct aconventional retaliatory operation, similar to FoW strategists, but also accelerate ally nuclear
proliferation on the logical grounds that “more [nuclear weapons] is better.” Primacists would
30

Van Jackson, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Nuclear Umbrella,” Foreign Policy (May 18, 2015),
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/18/raindrops-keep-falling-on-my-nuclear-umbrella-us-japan-south-northkorea/
31
Because the DPRK has more at risk than China in a US ally developing nuclear weapons, its incentives may belogically greater than China’s to conduct preventive attacks. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for mentioning this.
32
Lyle Goldstein, Preventive Attack and Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Comparative Historical Analysis (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
33
It remains unclear if the attack was conducted by US or Israeli forces, but both militaries had collaborated inplanning. On the problems with the preventive bombing tactic and the 2007 case in particular, see Sarah Kreps andMatthew Fuhrmann, “Attacking the Atom: Does Bombing Nuclear Facilities Affect Proliferation?” Journal ofStrategic Studies Vol. 34, no. 2 (2011), pp. 161-187.
34 The greatest operational impact would be to target Osan or Kunsan air bases in the ROK, or Kadena Air Base in
Okinawa. However, if the DPRK/China sought to maximize the chance of splitting the United States from its allies,
they would target ally (rather than US) basing facilities.

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12also be far more likely to pair the nuclear traditionalists’ signaling activities with direct threats ofnuclear brinkmanship intended to deter further actions against US allies as they complete their
nuclear operationalization.

Limited War Gone Wrong
A third pathway to US nuclear use in Northeast Asia concerns coercive escalation in aconventional limited war. Limited conventional war sits at the intersection of the willingness toresort to coercive uses of military force and the DPRK’s strategic culture of reflexively
responding to coercive pressure with counter-coercion.35 That limited war had not happened inseveral past crises with the DPRK owed to the United States refraining from using military force
against the North even when Pyongyang had initiated violence.36 But the US decision to mirrorimage North Korean brinkmanship during the 2017 nuclear crisis—and the leaked ruminations ofa “bloody nose” strike on Kim Jong Un that year—suggests that, for some American officials,
historical forbearance has eroded.37 Since 2015, moreover, there are indications that US
contingency planning has shifted to emphasize limited conventional war with the DPRK,38 which
implies that the United States believes it can fight and win such wars without resorting to either
nuclear war or a full five-phase traditional military campaign.39 And as the RAND Corporation
has analyzed, there are multiple ways a limited war could begin, including Kim Jong Un
launching attacks as a domestic political diversion, Kim misperceiving an imminent US or South
Korean attack that he responds to with a pre-emptive strike on US, South Korean, or Japaneseforces, or Kim attempting to “restore” deterrence following a punitive US preventive attack.40
Given the resource-constrained nature of limited war—by definition at least one side does notseek conquest or regime change—one of America’s goals is necessarily a cessation of violence,
which means the government’s theory of stability logically dictates how it goes about restoring
it. Faced with such circumstances, nuclear primacists are the only grouping that would be willing
to resort to limited nuclear use before the DPRK does. The belief that signaling both superior
resolve and superior nuclear capability will cow the DPRK incentivizes US nuclear escalation.
Other schools of thought, however, would only risk US nuclear use in retaliation for the DPRK
35 On the DPRK’s strategic culture of pressure for pressure, see Van Jackson, On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and theThreat of Nuclear War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 35-51; Van Jackson, “Want to Strike
North Korea? It’s Not Going to the Way You Think,” Political Magazine (January 12, 2018),
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/12/north-korea-strike-nuclear-strategist-216306/
36 Except for 1994 and 2017, it was US restraint that had steered every other crisis with the DPRK away fromoutright conflict. See Van Jackson, Rival Reputations: Coercion and Credibility in US-North Korea Relations(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
37 Jackson, On the Brink.
38
Michael Peck, “What Would It Take for An All-Out War in Korea?” The National Interest (July 22, 2021),
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/what-would-it-take-all-out-war-korea-190038
39
The phases of a military campaign describe the sequence of military operations necessary to realize military
objectives and political goals before instantiating a new status quo of stability. They span “shape, deter, seize
initiative, dominate, stabilize, enable civil authority.” See Lauren Fish, “Painting By Numbers: A History of the U.S.
Military’s Phasing Construct,” War on the Rocks (November 1, 2016),
https://warontherocks.com/2016/11/painting-by-numbers-a-history-of-the-u-s-militarys-phasing-construct/40
Michael Mazarr, Gian Gentile, Dan Madden, Stacey Pettyjohn, and Yvonne Crane, The Korean Peninsula: Three
Dangerous Scenarios (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018), p. 8.

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using nuclear weapons first during a limited conflict. Strategically, the DPRK has incentives totarget key nodes for US force flow into Korea (the port of Pusan in the ROK, Kadena Air Base in
Okinawa, or Anderson Air Base in Guam) in a first strike. If it launched non-nuclear strikes
against these same targets, it would be unlikely to trigger US nuclear use. Yet launching nuclear
warheads against this same target set would introduce differential responses based on the nuclear
school of thought at the helm of US policy.
Arms controllers would be most inclined to either immediately sue for peace or seek negotiations
in parallel with continuing conventional warfare, but they would not resort to nuclear retaliationin response to North Korean limited nuclear use as long as non-nuclear damage-limiting
alternative capabilities exist. FoW strategists would not be inclined to sue for peace but would
escalate conventional warfare by increasing the tempo and target set. FoW strategists would seek
to compel a cessation of hostilities and deter further North Korean escalation by signaling its
superior conventional capabilities.41 Escalating a punitive conventional response to limited
nuclear use would signal the superiority of even US conventional capabilities over North Korean
nuclear capabilities while simultaneously denying the DPRK the coercive advantages of its
nuclear use. Nuclear traditionalists, by contrast, and in accord with the principle of mutual
vulnerability, would feel immense pressures to resort to nuclear retaliation once the DPRK had
escalated to the nuclear level. The larger regime of US extended nuclear deterrence creates alogical commitment trap for traditionalists to respond to nuclear use in kind.

Conclusion
The typology of nuclear thinking described above can help anticipate the in-progress nuclear
thinking of the Biden presidency. As a Democratic administration, there are no political
appointees serving President Biden who have a track record of opinion that aligns with nuclear
primacists, and yet indications of the other three camps remains. Biden himself has madecomments in the recent past suggesting that the “sole purpose” of nuclear weapons should bedeterring the use of nuclear weapons, and he has made some nuclear-related political
appointments of experts who are known arms controllers.42 Both of these data points suggest a
degree of moderation and restraint toward questions of nuclear stability. At the same time,
however, some of his appointees are nuclear traditionalists who put forward a nuclear
modernization budget that was substantially similar to that proposed under Trump, and who
stress as part of “Indo-Pacific strategy” in particular the importance of US extended nuclear
deterrence commitments to allies.43 Those commitments are likely to ensure that nuclear
signaling remains a part of US statecraft, and nuclear superiority remains a goal of US defense
41

FoW strategists sometimes prize signaling US capability even more than signaling resolve. See Spencer Bakich,“Signalling Capacity and Crisis Diplomacy: Explaining the Failure of ‘Maximum Pressure’ in the 2017 U.S.-North
Korea Nuclear Crisis,” Journal of Strategic Studies (2020), Advance Access,https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2020.1755960
42
See, for example, Bryan Bender, “’This is Going to be Quite a Show’: Biden’s Arms Control Team Eyes Nuclear
Policy Overhaul,” Politico (January 27, 2021), https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/27/biden-nuclearweapons-policy-463335
43“Biden’s Disappointing First Nuclear Weapons Budget,” Arms Control Association Issue Brief Vol. 13, no. 4 (July 9,2021), https://www.armscontrol.org/issue-briefs/2021-07/bidens-disappointing-first-nuclear-weapons-budget

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14policy. The Pentagon, moreover, consists of both bureaucratic and politically appointed FoW
strategists who advocate for conventional military superiority over China as part of a construct of“great-power competition.” Like the Trump administration, Biden’s FoW strategists are building
budgets and tailoring force posture to prevail in conventional conflicts with China. They havesubsumed nuclear strategy within a more holistic concept of “integrated deterrence,” implying
the primacy not of nuclear weapons but rather technology-enabled precision-guided conventional
munitions.44 This concept is specifically meant to give use-of-force options to the president
without immediately resorting to nuclear weapons, though the risk of escalation to nuclear use isinherent.
In sum, understanding the varieties of US nuclear thought do not offer predictions but instead tell
us where to look in order to anticipate the magnitude and types of risks the president is willing toaccept. In the case of President Biden’s administration, the composite nature of nuclear thinking
points in multiple directions. While Biden may exhibit risk aversion in a nuclear crisis, his staff
may well be undertaking actions that make such a crisis more plausible, thereby leaving stability
more to chance and adversary reactions than to proactive restraint. But many futures are possible.
And as Herman Kahn of all people once conveyed, “The most likely future isn’t.”45
This paper has argued that there is no “United States perspective” on the virtues and problems of
nuclear weapons. Instead, there are different theories of stability that translate into different
orientations toward risk and different policy preferences. These competing, if implicit, theories
of stability influence the propensity for US policymakers to use nuclear weapons in Northeast
Asia in different ways. While there are plausible pathways to US nuclear use—an adversary’s
atmospheric nuclear test, ally nuclear near-proliferation, and coercive escalation in a limited
war—the likelihood of the unthinkable actually happening in any of those situations depends
substantially on which version of US nuclear thinking has the greatest grip on Washington’s
policy imagination at the time of crisis.

44

Michael O’Hanlon, “The Best Defense? An Alternative to All-Out War or Nothing,” Brookings Order From Chaos
Blog (May 21, 2021), https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/05/21/the-best-defense-analternative-to-all-out-war-or-nothing/
45
Herman Kahn, The Coming Boom: Economic, Political, and Social (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 82.

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