Aaron Stein , Sam Laird
U.S. Navy
Tomahawk and the Future of Stability and Deterrence in Europe
The Tomahawk cruise missile is a near perfect machine. Its development followed advances in guidance and turbofan engine technology in the 1970s. It has been tested for decades. And it has been upgraded and augmented for the same amount of time. The missile’s accuracy has always been a source of concern in Moscow, where its deployment in Europe in a ground-launched variant in the 1980s helped spur agreement on the elimination of this class of weapons, only for the erosion of arms control to once again be deployed within ground launch range of Russian targets.
A former Soviet Premier put it best in the days before the Cuban Missile Crisis. In response to the deployment of Jupiter missiles in Turkey, Nikita Khrushchev complained on a trip to the Black Sea that “[He] could see U.S. missiles in Turkey aimed at [his] dacha.”
Soviet and then Russian fears about American encirclement are as old as the missile age. The major concern, as Khrushchev so elegantly put it, is that the United States can put a missile through the window of a Russian dacha in 10 minutes or less. These concerns were first centered on fears of a nuclear first strike, but with changes to both U.S. doctrine and technology over the past 40-years, are now centered on American conventional overmatch: the idea that a U.S. first strike could be aimed at the Russian leadership and, with continued advances in missile defense and precision strike, could eventually be used to negate Russia’s nuclear deterrent.
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