Avoiding the McNamara Trap With China

04.01.2025 04:46

Observers of U.S.-China relations frequently invoke the “Thucydides Trap” to explain China as the rising power challenging the United States as the world’s preeminent power. These observers hope that U.S. and Chinese diplomacy will avoid any kinetic consequences of the Thucydides Trap. But a recent Pentagon report provides evidence that China’s military build-up, especially its nuclear weapons build-up, threatens to repeat another historical “trap” for the United States — let’s call it the McNamara Trap.

The McNamara Trap — named for the Kennedy-Johnson administration’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara — refers to the twin ideas that nuclear superiority is meaningless and strategic defenses only undermine “strategic stability.” The underlying rationale for those ideas was McNamara’s strategic doctrine called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which posited that the United States only required enough nuclear weapons and delivery systems to survive a first-strike attack by (then) the Soviet Union in order to effect strategic stability and deter a Soviet attack. At the time McNamara implemented MAD — in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis — the United States enjoyed nuclear superiority vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Indeed, it was American nuclear (and conventional) superiority that likely enabled the crisis to end peacefully, though the secret trade of our missiles in Turkey for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba obviously contributed to the Soviet decision to remove the missiles.

McNamara, however, took the wrong lesson from the crisis in Cuba. As Patrick Glynn noted, “the missile crisis inspired … McNamara to begin a radical revision of U.S. nuclear strategy, designed to remove U.S. policy even farther from the traditional logic of military power and bring it even closer into line with the vision embodied in arms control theory.” The decision was made to surrender our nuclear superiority and forego building and deploying strategic defenses. Glynn described it as McNamara “arguing in favor of strengthening the Soviet strategic arsenal.” And it also involved, wrote Glynn, “a deliberate decision to permit, even encourage, an increase in U.S. vulnerability to a Soviet second strike, in the supposed interest of assuring mutual stability.”

Mutual Assured Destruction, in Edward Luttwak’s words, was transformed by McNamara from theory into dogma. Instead of nuclear superiority supporting deterrence as it did throughout the Eisenhower years (“massive retaliation”), deterrence was replaced by mutual assured destruction. The problem here, however, was the term “mutual.” For McNamara’s doctrine to work, the Soviets had to buy into it. But they didn’t. MAD, Luttwak noted, “assumed the bilateral desirability of ‘stable deterrence,’ as if it did not matter that the United States was a status-quo power on the defensive, while the Soviet Union was … very much in pursuit of further zones of influence and control.” McNamara capped the number of U.S. ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) at 1,054 on the theory that once the Soviets caught up they would stop building more missiles in furtherance of McNamara’s idea of strategic stability. The Soviets, however, had other ideas. As Harold Brown, who worked for McNamara in the Pentagon and later served as Defense Secretary for President Jimmy Carter, remarked: When we build nuclear weapons the Soviets build; when we stop, they continue to build.

Under McNamara’s guidance, the United States deliberately surrendered its nuclear superiority and decided against building strategic defenses. The Soviet massive nuclear build-up, however, continued. By 1969, Luttwak noted, the Soviets achieved strategic parity, and they kept on building more and larger missiles. Eventually, with more accurate, more powerful missiles, and a greater number of ICBM warheads, the Soviets neared a theoretical “first-strike” capability. Recalling this history, Henry Kissinger testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1979 about the growing strategic imbalance in favor of the Soviets as follows: “[W]e have placed ourselves at a significant disadvantage voluntarily . . . it is the consequence of unilateral decisions extending over a decade and a half: by a strategic doctrine adopted in the sixties [MAD] … and by the choices of the present [Carter] administration.” It was the Reagan administration that reversed that trend — it ended the McNamara Trap and restored strategic deterrence.

The recent Pentagon report on China’s growing strategic nuclear force raises again the specter of the McNamara Trap. While the United States is estimated to have 1,419 nuclear warheads deployed and a stockpile of close to 3,800 non-deployed warheads, our nuclear force is aging. Meanwhile, Russia has more nuclear warheads deployed than we do, and China is engaging in a massive nuclear weapons build-up, reminiscent of the Soviet strategic build-up of the 1960s and 1970s, and which some are comparing to Nazi Germany’s military expansion in the 1930s. The Pentagon estimates that China currently deploys 600 operational warheads, and will deploy more than 1,000 warheads by 2030. If we do nothing in response to this strategic build-up, China will achieve rough nuclear parity by 2030 or 2035. It would be the McNamara Trap all over again, with both strategic and geopolitical consequences.

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