Barry Blechman and Russell Rumbaugh of the Stimson Center argue that the American military is so far superior to its global counterparts that “nuclear weapons add few options” to the U.S. palette. “Indeed, given U.S. conventional military superiority, nuclear weapons serve no military role for the United States beyond deterring nuclear attacks on itself and its allies,” they write in one of the report’s appendices.
Blechman and Rumbaugh formed one of three think-tank teams – the others came from the Center for a New American Security and the National Institute for Public Policy – that contributed to the report, along with experts from CSIS and elsewhere. Under a methodology dubbed the “competitive strategies approach,” each of the teams produced their own analyses, which were discussed by the report’s authors and ultimately included as appendices. But the final report represents Murdock’s conclusions alone.
“As the author of the final report, my views were shaped and influenced by the debate among the independent think tank teams, but did not attempt to bridge the differences on fundamentals between the competing approaches,” he wrote.
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