Real War (23 page)

The future direction of Chinese foreign policy is also unpredictable, except in one respect—China will do whatever its leaders believe will serve its interests. The Chinese like Americans better than they like Russians. At present the Russians threaten them and we do not. As long as they believe we have the strength and the will to hold the ring against the Russians, Sino-American friendship will be the linchpin of Chinese foreign policy. If our conduct in Asia or in any other part of the world leads them to conclude that we are not a credible friend or ally, they will, in the interest of their own survival, seek an accommodation with the Soviet Union despite their territorial, ideological, and personal quarrels with the Russian leaders. The role the Chinese play in the future is as much in our hands as theirs.

In dealing with the Chinese, however, we only gain their contempt by appearing too eager to please them. They need us at least as much as we need them—and probably more so because they are weaker and because our common potential adversary is much closer to them than to us.

When I last visited China in 1979 the focus of its leaders'
foreign policy concerns was on security, not expansion; they were interested in internal development, not foreign adventure. But they were deeply, intensely concerned with the Soviet threat and with whether the U.S. response to it would be adequate. The remarkably sophisticated global view they displayed was not that of the empire builder seeking worlds to conquer, but rather that of the world statesman seeking to maintain a global balance of power so that other nations as well as his own can be secure. If this view prevails into the next century, then China may indeed be “a great and progressing nation” and a powerful force for peace in the world. If we show that we are strong and reliable partners in maintaining security, there will be a better chance that that view will prevail.

No one in any country has slept less well in their beds because this knowledge [of the atomic bomb] and the method and the raw materials to apply it, are at present largely retained in American hands. I do not believe we should all have slept so soundly had the positions been reversed and if some communist or neo-Fascist State monopolized for the time being these dread agencies.

—Winston Churchill, 1946

It might be to our advantage to allow U.S. superiority to fade away. . . . [If we had weapons superiority], I suspect we would occasionally use it as a way of throwing our weight around in some very risky ways.

—
Victor Utgoff,

National Security Council Staff, 1978

In 1959 defense analyst Herman Kahn published a book,
On Thermonuclear War,
which received an extremely critical review in
Scientific American.
Kahn protested, and asked the editors to carry his reply, which he had entitled, “Thinking about the Unthinkable.” Dennis Flanagan, editor of the journal, rejected the request, and replied to Kahn that he did not “think there is much point in thinking about the unthinkable; surely it is more profitable to think about the thinkable.” Flanagan continued, “Nuclear war is unthinkable. I should prefer to devote my thoughts to how nuclear war can be prevented.”

Perhaps the editor's preference was justified two decades ago, when the United States enjoyed overwhelming strategic nuclear superiority over the U.S.S.R. Perhaps then the American people could afford to live in blissful ignorance of the dread facts of superpower conflict and a potential nuclear exchange. Such a conflict, such an exchange, could reasonably be judged to lie outside the arena of the possible.

But the “unthinkable” has become not only thinkable, but something about which we must think. The loss of American strategic superiority requires that we understand the probabilities and consequences of a possible nuclear exchange. Further, we must understand the concept of strategic balance, which could prevent such an exchange.

Nuclear superiority was very useful to us when we had it. It will be mortally dangerous for us if we allow the Russians to get it and keep it.

The fact is that a strategic advantage for the United States and the West reduces the danger of war or defeat without war. A strategic advantage for the Soviet Union increases the danger of war or defeat of the West without war. With the spectre of strategic inferiority staring us in the face, we must act now to restore the balance of power so that we can deter Soviet aggression and retain freedom for ourselves and all free nations. And I must emphasize
now,
for the strategic balance is rapidly becoming, in the words of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, “acutely dangerous,” while our options for dealing with limited local Soviet aggression have already been reduced in most parts of the world to near zero.

The United States and the U.S.S.R. are the only two superpowers. In nuclear strength the Soviets are rapidly moving into a position of clear-cut superiority. That superiority is particularly threatening because of two deeply disturbing facts: First, it will be attained before the United States can do anything about it given present programs and funding. Second, it will be characterized by dangerous vulnerabilities in our deterrent forces and by a gross disparity favoring the Soviet Union in the ability to fight, win, and recover from a nuclear war. That means that the Soviet leaders will be able to “deter our deterrent” and threaten us more credibly with nuclear escalation than we can threaten them. At the same time, the Soviets have an enormous
advantage over us in conventional ground forces and in theater nuclear forces—those designed for use within a specific region such as Europe or the Far East. Their geographical proximity to many of the prospective areas of confrontation—in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa—gives them an additional advantage. The United States has traditionally been superior in sea power, but the Soviet Union is rapidly closing the gap there as well.

These facts paint an ominous picture for the West.

Nations tend to favor those instruments they excel at, and the Soviets favor military force as an instrument of policy. Not only Russians but communists in general have consistently stressed the overwhelming importance of military might. Mao Zedong declared long ago that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” He also commented that “politics is war without bloodshed; war is politics with bloodshed.” Khrushchev defined his policy as “Only force—only the disorientation of the enemy. We can't say aloud that we are carrying out our policy from a position of strength, but that's the way it must be.”

•  •  •

In considering the military balance between East and West it is important to remember that the two sides arm for different purposes. The Soviets have been engaged in a determined arms race because they want strategic superiority over the United States, and every year their effort has continued to increase. Our effort has not kept pace. It has, in fact, declined. In the 1960s the United States deliberately adopted the McNamara doctrine of self-restraint, which was intended to induce a reciprocal Soviet restraint and lead to arms limitation agreements that would benefit both sides. Instead, the Soviets have taken advantage of it to further their own drive for superiority. The Soviets have raced, and the United States has not; the result has been a rapid change in strategic balance virtually unprecedented in history. Not only have the efforts of the two sides differed, but so have their views of the nature of the competition. In the West arms are maintained as a necessity of defense; in the East arms are maintained to achieve the expansion of Soviet power. So the “arms race” is not a race between two contenders with the same goal. It is now more nearly akin to the
race between hunter and hunted. If the hunted wins, both live; if the hunter wins, only one lives.

This imbalance of intentions affects the balance of power. It gives the Soviets the aggressor's edge. The aggressor chooses the time and place of combat, whether in the jungles of Vietnam, a strike into central Europe, or an intercontinental nuclear exchange. We have to offset this aggressor's edge by effective deterrence, whether by the superiority of our forces or by the skill and determination with which we use them. To create an equilibrium in the conflict—to preserve our safety—we need either more power to offset their inherent advantage or clear evidence that our will to use our power to defend our interests is equal to theirs. This is the context in which we should consider the strategic balance.

•  •  •

For a quarter of a century American nuclear superiority kept the peace. Now that superiority is gone, and if present trends continue, the Soviets will have strategic nuclear superiority by the mid-eighties.

What is superiority? In our hands it was the safety margin that ensured that the Soviets would not risk a nuclear exchange in pursuing their goal of world domination. In Soviet hands it becomes the margin that enables them to proceed with local aggression without expecting a massive nuclear response. It also enables them to contemplate the final act in their drive toward world domination: a first strike against U.S. military targets that eliminates our capacity to respond with a counterstrike that would effectively neutralize their second-strike capability. This would then leave them in position to deliver the ultimate ultimatum: Surrender or be obliterated.

In 1972 SALT I, with the Jackson Amendment, established parity—in other words, equivalence—as U.S. policy. Parity is an uneasy condition; because of the aggressor's edge, as long as we live in a situation of parity, we live with risk. But parity is infinitely better than inferiority, and parity is something about which negotiators can negotiate. Mutually beneficial arms restraints between the two major powers can only be agreed upon on a basis of parity. Strategic parity is a situation we can live safely with—but only if it is true parity and only if we also have sufficient strength in theater nuclear weapons, if we
have strong conventional forces, if we show will and skill in the use of our power, and if we successfully link things the Soviets want in the military and economic spheres with things we want in the political sphere, most particularly with curbs on Soviet adventuring. While superiority would be preferable, with those conditions, strategic parity is acceptable, but only with those conditions.

By parity, I do not mean some arbitrary and minimum “assured destruction” capability. Parity does not mean accepting wide divergencies between U.S. and Soviet capabilities. It means that our strategic forces must be
sufficient
for the tasks and purposes we set, and also that they must not be inferior to the forces of the Soviet Union. Parity means that the Soviets have
no
advantages that are not offset by U.S. advantages; no capabilities that they could expect to exploit against us either militarily or politically.

In military terms, this means that the Soviet Union must not have the capability to win a war against the United States. In political terms, it means that the Soviet leaders should not
think
that in a confrontation they would have a strategic nuclear advantage over the United States—and neither should the leaders of any other nation believe that the Soviets would have that advantage.

It is essential that the United States have, and be seen to have, at least as much flexibility and sophistication in our forces as the Soviets have in theirs—in addition to having simply as much weight, or as many total warheads, or as many missile launchers. In order to deal effectively with the Soviet strategic nuclear forces of the future, we will require retaliatory forces in sufficient numbers and with sufficient types of weapons to survive a well-executed surprise attack on them, and then to carry out their assigned retaliatory mission in a way that will control escalation, rather than cause it. That means they must be able to penetrate Soviet defenses and destroy military targets in the U.S.S.R., with enough survivable reserve forces to constitute an adequate remaining deterrent.

With parity so defined, the Russians are not likely to launch a first strike on the United States, and they are not likely to engage in the sort of overt aggression that would be calculated to trigger a strategic nuclear response. Strategic parity gives
us a good chance of keeping the nuclear genie in the bottle, and ensuring both sides that nuclear weapons will be used politically and diplomatically rather than militarily. But it does not create a risk-free environment; it does not relieve us of the necessity to maintain strong conventional and theater nuclear forces, able to preserve a local balance of power in each threatened area; it does not unburden us of the need to use power, or to deliver a credible threat to use it if challenged. The aggressor's edge must be neutralized by the power and will of those threatened by aggressors.

Parity at the strategic nuclear level makes it even more imperative that we substantially increase our general-purpose forces and improve our regional capabilities. In the past U.S. nuclear superiority compensated for regional imbalances in conventional forces. When the United States had nuclear superiority Soviet leaders had to be concerned that hostilities anywhere in the world might lead to the use of American strategic power against the Soviet Union. But strategic parity magnifies the significance of any regional Soviet superiority in conventional and tactical nuclear forces, thus increasing the threat to the security of that region.

Within an overall framework of strategic parity, the usual play and counterplay of force and diplomacy goes forward on other levels. Parity can be sufficient if we are strong enough in other areas—theater nuclear forces, conventional forces, the strength and cohesion of our alliances, the will and skill of our leaders—to check Soviet adventuring without holding a strategic advantage. If we fail in these other areas, then parity will no longer be sufficient; then we will have to resume an all-out arms race, and go all out to win. Otherwise we will lose.