Real War (25 page)

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While my administration sought a stable situation of mutual deterrence and parity between the United States and the Soviet Union, we wished at the same time to move away from the reliance on assured destruction that had come to dominate U.S. thinking and planning. We wished to restore the strategic and political considerations that had been lost in MAD thinking. In 1969 we established four criteria for strategic sufficiency, which in essence stipulated that an assured destruction capability was necessary but not sufficient. In addition, we required forces that could assure stability in a crisis, that did not allow the Soviets to attain nuclear superiority over the United States, and that could be used to limit damage in the event of an attack.

I tried in another way to move our thinking somewhat away from assured destruction. In my 1970 foreign policy message
to Congress I asked the rhetorical question: Should a President in the event of nuclear attack “be left with the single option of ordering the mass destruction of enemy civilians, in the face of the certainty that it would be followed by the mass slaughter of Americans?”

In my 1971 foreign policy message I provided an unequivocal answer: “I must not be—and my successors must not be—limited to the indiscriminate mass destruction of enemy civilians as the sole possible response to challenges. This is especially so when that response involves the likelihood of triggering nuclear attacks on our own population. It would be inconsistent with the political meaning of sufficiency to base our force planning solely on some finite—and theoretical—capacity to inflict casualties presumed to be unacceptable to the other side.” I emphasized that we needed in our strategic forces the flexibility and options to enable us to select and carry out the appropriate response without having to resort to mass destruction.

The need for options becomes even more imperative as the Soviets imminently approach the capacity to destroy U.S. counterforce capability. When they reach that goal, a U.S. President, under the MAD doctrine, will have only one option to exercise in response to a Soviet first strike—mass suicide. This “deterrent” would be ineffective and immoral. Consequently, it would lack all credibility and U.S. foreign policy would be hostage to Soviet aggression.

For years the prevailing U.S. concept has been that nuclear war could not and would not bring any meaningful form of victory, either military or political. The Soviet concept, however, has been that nuclear war—even though it would mean a disaster of immense proportions—cannot and must not be deprived of strategic meaning. However awful, nuclear war in their view must be survivable and some kind of meaningful victory attainable.

As Harvard historian
Richard Pipes observes:

The prevalent U.S. doctrine holds that an all-out war between countries in possession of sizeable nuclear arsenals would be so destructive as to leave no winner; thus resort to arms has ceased to represent a rational policy for the leaders of such countries vis-à-vis one another. . . . Soviet doctrine, by
contrast, emphatically asserts that while an all-out nuclear war would indeed prove extremely destructive to both parties, its outcome would not be mutual suicide: the country better prepared for it and in possession of a superior strategy could win and emerge a viable society.

Pipes puts the issue in historical perspective:

A country that since 1914 has lost, as a result of two world wars, a civil war, famine, and various “purges,” perhaps up to 60 million citizens, must define “unacceptable damage” differently from the United States which has known no famines or purges, and whose deaths from all the wars waged since 1775 are estimated at 650,000—fewer casualties than Russia suffered in the 900-day siege of Leningrad in World War II alone.

The rise in Soviet power has given urgency to the differences between the two superpowers' doctrines in this crucial area. Strategic victory and survival in a possible nuclear war have become less credible than ever to Americans as the strategic power of the U.S.S.R. has grown. For the Soviets, in contrast, the growth of their strategic arms and civil defense programs has made their doctrine of victory even more plausible than it was before. Soviet leaders now seem to believe that under favorable circumstances the Soviet Union could win a war with the United States in which strategic nuclear weapons were used. And within a few short years, the circumstances will be favorable for them.

Most observers believe that it is unlikely that the Soviets will launch a massive preemptive strike against our retaliatory forces. But we must recognize that in addition to having the
ability
to do just that, they will also have the ability to do less: for example, to obliterate the American combat brigades stationed in West Germany. Their capacity to neutralize our retaliatory forces gives increased credibility to their lesser options. This means that they might reasonably believe they could launch a limited nuclear strike on our forces in Europe without the fear they have had since the establishment of NATO that the United States could and would retaliate with a strategic nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

American strategic superiority after World War II was critically useful to us and to the free world because of our fundamentally defensive posture. It was the center of gravity of our political weight. It was the trump card enabling us to use our conventional forces to achieve political ends. It put severe constraints on the Soviets, and forced them to be careful not to provoke us where they thought we might react. If we allow the Soviets to gain and retain strategic superiority, we must face the fact that they would be greatly emboldened to employ power outside the communist bloc. If the Soviet Union holds strategic nuclear superiority and thus dominates the threat of escalation, Soviet leaders and others as well may conclude that the United States will be little inclined to oppose Soviet expansionist moves with military force, and will thus be less and less resolute in confrontations with the Soviet Union.

The greatest danger in a period of Soviet nuclear superiority is defeat without war. A voice from abroad, the London
Economist,
speaks clearly to this point:

By the early 1980s, the growing number of increasingly accurate warheads Russia can pack into its huge missiles will put it in a position of being able to destroy virtually all of America's land-based missiles in a single half-hour cataclysm, while still keeping quite a lot of its own missiles in reserve, ready for a second blow. . . . If that Russian first strike did happen, an American counterattack against the Soviet missile system would have to depend mainly on the aircraft-carried cruise missiles permitted under SALT II which would take ten hours to trundle toward their targets—and even then would destroy not much more than half of the Soviet launching silos.

This is not “parity.” It is often said, quite correctly, that even with these advantages the Russians would probably not press the button for the unimaginable ghastliness of a nuclear exchange. This misses the point of nuclear mathematics. The point is that the Russians would not have to. If they know that even a theoretical exchange of Soviet first strike and American counter-strike would leave them with more surviving missiles, which would then hold America's cities hostage, they would know that the American President would know it too; and that he would be paralyzed by his knowledge as the grizzly
game of bluff and counter-bluff moved closer to the button-pressing point. This is the political reality behind the apparently abstract calculations of who-would-have-more-missiles-left.

In the Russians' favorite game of chess the queen plays a crucial role even though she may not be used. On the chessboard of international politics the queen of their chess set, nuclear weapons, can play a decisive role without ever being used.

Sir Robert
Thompson puts it brutally well:

When World War III is discussed most people think of it in terms of a nuclear exchange between Russia and China or between Russia and the United States, either of which would drag us all in, but it is quite pointless to think in terms of winning the war by that means. . . . The thesis, therefore, which I wish to propose is that we have been in World War III for the past 25 years and that the long-range Soviet goal is to win it without a nuclear exchange. This requires that eventually there should be a strategic surrender by the United States, brought about either politically and psychologically by a loss of will and purpose or politically and militarily by maneuvering the United States into a vulnerable and untenable global situation, or a bit of both.

In the 1962 Cuban missile crisis Kennedy was able to face down Khrushchev because of our decisive strategic superiority, but by the mid-1980s the positions of Kennedy and Khrushchev could be reversed. We would be doing the bluffing, and they would be calling our hand.

In political terms, as Stalin put it, nuclear weapons are things that can be used to “frighten people with weak nerves.” And it is this dimension of will, nerve, and perceived will that has grown in importance as the Soviet nuclear arsenal has overtaken our own. Nuclear coercion, even more perhaps than nuclear war, is the real danger today, and it is heightened by the wide differences between the Soviets and ourselves regarding nuclear doctrine. These differences flow inevitably from the different historical and cultural experiences of the two superpowers and they mean one thing: the assumption that the strategic concepts of Russia and America are similar, which guides much of the arms control community in this country, is dead wrong.

When I took office in 1969 the previous administration had been devoted for some time to the idea of strategic arms limitations with the Soviet Union, and for two years had been actively seeking Soviet agreement to SALT. American strategic arms policies during that period had been SALT oriented or influenced. The message of these was that the United States was willing to forgo strategic superiority in return for a SALT-agreed mutual deterrent relationship based on parity and mutual assured destruction (MAD). This approach had the effect of inviting the Soviet Union to catch up with the United States in overall strategic capability. Unfortunately, by 1969 it was clear that Soviet forces were being developed more extensively and more rapidly than anticipated, and with characteristics that did not conform to the requirements of MAD. In particular, there was growing evidence of a future Soviet threat to American land-based deterrent forces. It was for that reason that I decided in March 1969 to reorient the Sentinel ABM program, with its emphasis on light area defense, to a new program, Safeguard, that emphasized defense of those threatened deterrent forces.

We also continued the SALT negotiations initiated by the Johnson administration—in part because we hoped to reach long-term equitable limitation agreements that would provide greater strategic stability with fewer arms. Congress and the country were clearly not receptive to costly new strategic force programs, as demonstrated by the fact that the Senate approved the Safeguard ABM system by a margin of only one vote, and it took the heaviest pressure we could muster to manage even that. We needed to buy time, and also to test Soviet intentions concerning arms limitations. If acceptable limitations could not be achieved, and if the Soviets meanwhile continued their strategic buildup, we would have the evidence that might persuade Congress to support the strategic programs we would then need. We did hope that the Soviet Union would accept truly stabilizing arms agreements. We also hoped that SALT would prepare the way for an era of improved relations in which competition would be supplemented by international cooperation and confrontation supplanted by negotiation.

Early American proposals designed to stabilize the strategic situation—to freeze the central strategic offensive systems, to establish equal ceilings on them, and to reduce them—were rejected by the Soviet Union. At the same time, Soviet strategic force levels continued to rise. By 1971 our more ambitious SALT goals had to be abandoned, replaced by the simple objective of securing Soviet agreement to offensive limitations that would halt the continuing buildup of Soviet launchers. The Soviet objective was clearly to continue that launcher construction until planned programs were completed and to limit the U.S. ABM to as low levels as possible. The Soviets were interested in curtailing the U.S. ABM, for the general reason that this was an area in which we had technological superiority, and for the specific reason that the ABM would interfere with their counterforce doctrine, since its primary purpose was defense of Minuteman.

The United States took the position that our ABM requirements were determined by the extent of the offensive threat to Minuteman; if that threat could be reduced, so could our defensive requirements. That was the principle of defense-offense linkage. In a broader sense, we were more concerned about the continued growth of Soviet offensive capabilities. Therefore, we could not agree to limit ABM without offensive force limitations. The Soviets insisted on ABM limitations only. Because of the Soviet buildup, we were unable to achieve offensive limitations consistent with the levels of defense established. But we did eventually succeed in getting an interim five-year agreement limiting offensive arms coupled with the ABM treaty.

We were not completely satisfied with that offensive force agreement. It allowed the Soviets higher levels than previously deemed acceptable, and higher than those permitted the United States. But this simply reflected the realities of the situation at that time, and we intended that the offensive agreement would last no more than five years. To emphasize this, the United States added to the treaty a formal declaration that stated, “If an agreement providing for more complete strategic offensive arms limitations were not achieved within five years, U.S. supreme interests could be jeopardized. Should that occur, it would constitute a basis for withdrawal from the ABM Treaty.”

During that five years we believed that Soviet advantages would be offset by U.S. advantages, particularly in technology, and that vigorous U.S. research and development and force modernization programs would both preserve that situation and induce the Soviets to be receptive to an equitable follow-on agreement. We hoped that the SALT I agreement would thereby promote a better SALT II agreement, and also buy us time. We also hoped that it would have some moderating effect on the Soviet buildup.