Nuclear strategy



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strategy: Strategy in the age of nuclear weapons

Nuclear strategy is no different from any other form of military strategy in that it involves relating military means to political ends. In this case, however, the military means in question are so powerful and destructive that it has been doubted whether any worthwhile political purpose could be served by their use. On the one hand, it has been questioned whether any country with pretensions to civilization could unleash such a devastating force as nuclear weapons. On the other hand, it has been noted that their use against an opponent similarly endowed would result in an equally ruinous retaliation. The central issue for nuclear strategy, therefore, is less how to win and wage a nuclear war than whether by preparing to do so it is possible to create a deterrent effect. The minimum objective would be to deter another’s nuclear use, and the maximum would be to deter any aggression, on the grounds that any hostilities might create the extreme circumstances in which the restraints on nuclear use would fall away.


With the end of the Cold War, most of those scenarios became moot, raising the question of whether there was still a role for nuclear strategy. The answer seemed to lie largely in how the consequences of nuclear proliferation fit into a much more complex international system. With the rise of tensions around the peripheries of both Russia and China, however, it became most possible to imagine circumstances in which a great power war might break out, which would always carry a risk of nuclear escalation.


The atomic bomb and American strategic thought

The first successful test of the atomic bomb took place in New Mexico in July 1945 as the leaders of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States met at the Potsdam Conference to discuss the shape of the postwar world. That context coloured the early American appreciation of the potential foreign-policy role of the new weapon, with the result that nuclear strategy thereafter became bound up with the twists and turns of the Cold War between East and West.


The first nuclear weapons were in the range of other munitions; the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was equivalent to the load of some 200 B-29 bombers. Also, at least initially, the weapons were scarce. The key development introduced by atomic bombs was less in the scale of their destructive power than in their efficiency. By the start of the 1950s, though, that situation had been transformed by two related developments. The first was the breaking of the U.S. monopoly by the Soviet Union, which conducted its first atomic bomb test in August 1949. Once two could play the nuclear game, the rules had to be changed. Anyone who thought of initiating nuclear war would henceforth need to consider the possibility of retaliation.

The second development followed from the first. In an effort to extend its effective nuclear superiority, the United States produced thermonuclear bombs, based on the principles of nuclear fusion rather than fission, upon which the atomic bombs were based. That made possible weapons with no obvious limits to their destructive potential. Opposition to that development by influential nuclear scientists, such as Robert Oppenheimer, was disregarded by U.S. Pres. Harry S. Truman on the grounds that the Soviet Union would not suffer from any comparable moral inhibitions.


Massive retaliation

The administration of U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, which came to power in January 1953, saw things differently. It reflected on the frustrating experience of the inconclusive conventional war fought in Korea and wondered why the West had not made more use of its nuclear superiority. Eisenhower was also extremely worried about the economic burden of conventional rearmament. Assigning a greater priority to nuclear weapons provided the opportunity to scale down expensive conventional forces. By that time the nuclear arsenal was becoming more plentiful and more powerful.

The strategy that emerged from those considerations became known as “massive retaliation,” following a speech made by U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in January 1954, when he declared that in the future a U.S. response to aggression would be “at places and with means of our own choosing.” That doctrine was interpreted as threatening nuclear attack against targets in the Soviet Union and China in response to conventional aggression anywhere in the world.

Massive retaliation was widely criticized. In the United States the Democratic Party, whose policy under Truman was being reversed—and the army and navy, whose budgets were being cut at the expense of the air force’s Strategic Air Command—charged that it placed undue reliance on nuclear threats, which would become less credible as Soviet nuclear strength grew. If a limited challenge developed anywhere around the Sino-Soviet periphery (the two communist giants were seen to constitute a virtual monolith) and the United States neglected its own conventional forces, then a choice would have to be faced between “suicide or surrender.”

First and second strikes

Massive retaliation was also criticized for failing to appreciate possible areas of Soviet superiority. That criticism grew after the Soviet Union demonstrated its technological prowess by successfully launching the first artificial Earth satellite (Sputnik 1) in October 1957, not long after it had also made the first tests of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the SS-6. Concern grew that the Soviet Union was outpacing the United States in missile production and thereby leading to a “missile gap.” (It might have been argued that after a certain level of destructive capability had been reached by both sides, an effective stalemate would be reached and extra weapons would make little difference, promising only, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it, to make “the rubble bounce.”)

However, by that time nuclear strategy was becoming much more sophisticated. With the RAND Corporation, a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, taking the lead, new analytical techniques were being developed. Those were often drawn from engineering and economics, rather than the more traditional strategic disciplines of history and politics. In a celebrated RAND study of the mid-1950s, a team led by Albert Wohlstetter demonstrated that the air bases of the Strategic Air Command could be vulnerable to a surprise attack, after which retaliation would be impossible, a situation that would expose the United States and its allies to Soviet blackmail.

A devastating surprise attack was considered possible because, with improved guidance systems, nuclear weapons were becoming more precise. Therefore, it was not inevitable that they would be used solely in countervalue strikes against easily targeted political and economic centres. Instead, it was just as likely that they would be used in counterforce strikes against military targets. A successful counterforce attack that rendered retaliation impossible—known as a “first strike”—would be strategically decisive. If, however, the attacked nation possessed sufficient forces to survive an attempted first strike with retaliatory weapons intact, then it would have what became known as a “second-strike” capability.

Other strategists, such as Thomas Schelling, warned that if both sides sought a first-strike capability, that could lead to an extremely unstable situation, especially during a period of high political tension when both were nervous as to the other’s intentions. If it was feared that an enemy first strike was imminent, then there would be powerful pressures to attack first, and if the enemy recognized those pressures, then that would encourage him to get in his strike. Schelling described that as the “reciprocal fear of surprise attack.”

On the other hand, if both sides were confident of their second-strike capabilities, then there would be considerable stability, as there would be no premium attached to unleashing nuclear hostilities. The benefits of a mutual second-strike capability led to the concept of arms control, by which potential adversaries would put less priority on simply lowering their force levels (as advocated by proponents of disarmament) and more on removing incentives to take the military initiative in the event of a severe crisis.

Mutual assured destruction

In the event, technological developments supported the second strike. Initially, long-range bombers had to be kept on continual alert to prevent them from being eliminated in a surprise attack. When ICBMs moved into full production in the early 1960s with such systems as the U.S. Titan and Minuteman I and the Soviet SS-7 and SS-8, they were placed in hardened underground silos so that it would require an unlikely direct hit to destroy them. Even less vulnerable were submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) such as the U.S. Polaris and the Soviet SS-N-5 and SS-N-6, which could take full advantage of the ocean expanses to hide from enemy attack.

Meanwhile, attempts to develop effective defenses against nuclear attack proved futile. The standards for antiaircraft defense in the nuclear age had to be much higher than for conventional air raids, since any penetration of the defensive screen would threaten the defender with catastrophe. Progress was made, using surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) such as the U.S. Nike series, in developing defenses against bombers, but the move to ICBMs, with their minimal warning time before impact, appeared to render the defensive task hopeless. Then, during the 1960s, advances in radars and long-range SAMs promised a breakthrough in antiballistic missile defense, but by the early 1970s those in turn had been countered by improvements in offensive missiles—notably multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs), which could swamp any defenses. (The first MIRVed ICBMs were the U.S. Minuteman III and the Soviet SS-17.)

Measures of civil defense, which could offer little protection to the civilian populace against nuclear explosions and, at best, only some chance of avoiding exposure to nuclear fallout, also appeared hopeless in the face of the overwhelming destructive power being accumulated by both sides.

By the mid-1960s, fears had eased of a technological arms race that might encourage either side to unleash a surprise attack. For the foreseeable future, each side could eliminate the other as a modern industrial state. Robert McNamara, U.S. secretary of defense for much of that decade, argued that so long as the two superpowers had confidence in their capacity for mutual assured destruction—an ability to impose “unacceptable damage,” defined as 25 percent of population and 50 percent of industry—the relationship between the two would be stable.

The need to maintain strategic stability influenced the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), which began in 1969 and became the centrepiece of U.S. Pres. Richard M. Nixon’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union. In 1972, with the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, the two sides agreed to ban nationwide antiballistic missile systems, thereby confirming the primacy of the offense. Attempts to consolidate the strategic standoff with a treaty limiting offensive weapons proved more difficult. (In 1972 only an interim freeze had been agreed upon.) The second round of talks was guided mainly by the concept of parity, by which a broad equality in destructive power would be confirmed. However, the difficulty in comparing the two nuclear arsenals, which differed in important respects, resulted in long and complex negotiations. A treaty called SALT II was agreed on in June 1979, but by that time détente was in decline, and it was dealt a final blow with the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan at the end of that year. In addition, the strategic underpinnings of arms control had been undermined by a growing dissatisfaction in the United States with the principles of mutual assured destruction.

Alternatives to mutual assured destruction



The realism of that scenario may be doubted, given that no attack against U.S. ICBMs would be accurate enough to avoid massive civilian destruction. Therefore, the Soviet Union could be certain that the United States would feel little repugnance at retaliating against Soviet cities. Nonetheless, it was used to criticize SALT II, a complicated treaty that offered few means of verification and did little to interfere with the Soviet ICBM program. It was also used to argue for the development of U.S. ICBMs comparable to the Soviet systems.

The first formal break with mutual assured destruction had come when Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger announced in 1974 that future U.S. nuclear targeting would be geared to selective strikes and not just the sort of massive attacks suggested by the philosophy of mutual assured destruction. Although U.S. Pres. Jimmy Carter’s secretary of defense, Harold Brown, was skeptical that either side would actually find such sophisticated nuclear strikes possible, he accepted the need to develop a range of targeting options to convince the Soviet Union that it could not gain the upper hand by such methods. That was the main theme of the “countervailing” strategy announced in 1980.

Ronald W. Reagan came to office the next year with a much more radical critique of MAD, and his presidency was devoted to attempts to escape from its constraints. Initially, that took the form of a search for offensive nuclear operations that would enable the United States to prevail in a protracted war with the Soviet Union, rather than just countervail. It involved upgrading the old civil defense systems and deploying the MX, an experimental ICBM originally designed to survive a first strike through some form of mobile deployment. Neither of those ideas was politically popular. In the end, civil defense was rejected as impossible, and the MX (later named the Peacekeeper missile) was deployed in Minuteman silos and in only a fraction of the originally proposed numbers.



The switch to arms reduction suggested that Reagan’s critique of MAD had concluded with the view that, given the difficulties of designing and deploying both discriminating offensive options and effective ballistic missile defenses, it was better to do away with nuclear weapons altogether. That constituted a formidable challenge to the orthodox view that nuclear weapons exercised a stabilizing deterrence on international misbehaviour and were a reassurance to allies of the United States, who faced preponderant Soviet conventional forces. Reagan was prevailed upon to moderate his critique, but not before doubts had been created as to the strength of the U.S. commitment to guaranteeing with nuclear weapons the security of its allies.



Nuclear strategy
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