On Jan. 25, U.S. Strategic Command announced the kickoff of Global Lightning 22, an annual staff/command nuclear warfighting post exercise that this year is being conducted jointly with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Stratcom’s release, however, said very little else about the exercise. The involvement of Indo-Pacom indicates that this year’s exercise scenario is aimed at China (last year’s was targeted at Russia). Nonetheless, what Russia sees, according to national security experts William Arkin and Mark Ambinder in an article published in Newsweek on Jan. 28, is “decision-makers focused on the latest plan, nuclear command and control circuits opened and tested, new innovations and capabilities incorporated and practiced.”
They also expose the existence of Stratcom’s current nuclear war plan, courtesy of Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, entitled “STRATCOM CONPLAN 0810-12, ‘Strategic Deterrence and Force Deployment,’ Change 1.” Kristensen acquired the title page via a Freedom of Information Act request. He told Arkin and Ambinder that the Global Lightning exercise: “includes practicing operations during a trans-/post-attack nuclear environment, including reconstitution, redirection and targeting of STRATCOM forces.” In other words, it not only contemplates nuclear first use by one side or the other, but also continued nuclear warfighting after the initial exchange.
The war plan also includes another innovation developed over the past two decades: “The incorporation of non-nuclear capabilities into the nuclear war plan that allows contingency planners to assume enough capabilities to survive a Russia first strike, to retaliate, to absorb more attacks, retaliate again, and keep on doing the same again and again,” the two experts write. “It’s a capability that’s more provocative than the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) trope of the past, and one that receives shocking little attention.”
