STRATEGIC STUDIES QUARTERLY WINTER 2020 47
STRATEGIC STUDIES QUARTERLY - PERSPECTIVE
Nuclear- Armed Hypersonic
Weapons and Nuclear Deterrence
Col Stephen Reny, USAF
Abstract
Nuclear- armed hypersonic weapons, with their ballistic missile defense
(BMD) penetrating capability, will provide an overall strategically stabi-
lizing eect in the global arena but will further destabilize regional com-
petitions. Development and deployment of BMD is a strategically desta-
bilizing agent since adversaries perceive that they can no longer hold each
other at risk of a retaliatory nuclear strike. Nuclear hypersonic weapons,
with their promised capability to defeat missile defenses, will bolster ex-
pectations of reciprocal nuclear strikes. When this capability to provide
retaliation is undermined, strategic instability ensues and manifests as
arms races, aggressive posturing, and bellicose rhetoric. erefore, global
nuclear powers, with their robust counterforce capabilities, should develop
nuclear- armed hypersonic weapons to return deterrence to an era of as-
sured vulnerability that keeps nuclear weapons holstered. However, intro-
ducing hypersonics, with rst- strike counterforce and decapitation capa-
bilities, to regional nuclear power competitions will have the opposite
eect, further destabilizing an already uneasy peace. In both cases, some
period of greater strategic instability will exist as nuclear- armed hyper-
sonic weapons become operational in an unbalanced manner. at is, as
one nuclear power attains BMD- defeating capability, opposing powers
will perceive that they are at a disadvantage. To mitigate this transition
period of instability, global powers should proceed in developing hyper-
sonic weapons but counter regional instability by banning regional devel-
opment and curtailing hypersonic technology proliferation.
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O
ver two decades ago, Keith Payne wrote in Deterrence in the Sec-
ond Nuclear Age on the challenges of the changing dynamics of
nuclear deterrence in the era following the bipolar Cold War. He
cautions, with near clairvoyance, that the US needs to balance assured
nuclear retaliation against the Russian Federation while hedging protec-
tion against rogue states with ballistic missile defense (BMD) develop-
ment.
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In other words, the US must consider the second- and third- order
