Law Professor: Joint Chiefs Nominee's Warnings About Russia Could Trigger 'Enormous Spending' on Nuclear Weapons
July 13, 2015
Contact: University Relations
Phone: 410.837.5739
Writing in his column in Forbes magazine, Charles Tiefer, professor in the University of Baltimore School of Law, says that new warnings about Russia may inspire large-scale defense spending—so much so, he says, that topping at $1 trillion would be considered "getting off cheap."
Tiefer's columni elaborates on testimony given before the Senate Armed Services Committee by the nominated chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, Jr. Dunford told the committee that he sees Russia as an "existential threat" to the United States.
"What is he talking about?" Tiefer asks in his column. "Conventional arms? Hardly. Back in the day, the Soviet Union had the tank armies to threaten the whole of Western Europe. The Russian Army today takes on enemies like Chechnya and Ukraine—in other words, it bullies the weak.
"Obviously, when Dunford identifies an 'existential' threat, he means the strategic nuclear threat—that Russia would hit the United States with a nuclear strike. In the near term, his concern arises from seeing Putin's unpredictable and aggressive moves as to Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. But, as to such a thing going nuclear, it never did in the Cold War. We still have the enormously power strategic nuclear arsenal that deterred even the world-threatening Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Why isn't this still the answer for the future as for the past?
"Because, as to the future, Gen. Dunford is alluding to the aging of that American strategic triad—ICBM missiles, long-distance bombers, nuclear submarines, and the nuclear weapons they carry. They have been in place for many decades. It is General Dunford's mission to raise the fear level of the American public to the level it will begin to authorize the enormous long-term spending on modernizing that strategic nuclear triad."
Read the column.
Learn more about Prof. Tiefer and the UB School of Law.