History and Strategy

Marc Trachtenberg

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691217987
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This work is a powerful demonstration of how historical analysis can be brought to bear on the study of strategic issues, and, conversely, how strategic thinking can help drive historical research. Based largely on newly released American archives, History and Strategy focuses on the twenty years following World War II. By bridging the sizable gap between the intellectual world of historians and that of strategists and political scientists, the essays here present a fresh and unified view of how to explore international politics in the nuclear era. The book begins with an overview of strategic thought in America from 1952 through 1966 and ends with a discussion of "making sense" of the nuclear age. Trachtenberg reevaluates the immediate causes of World War I, studies the impact of the shifting nuclear balance on American strategy in the early 1950s, examines the relationship between the nuclearization of NATO and U.S.-West European relations, and looks at the Berlin and the Cuban crises. He shows throughout that there are startling discoveries to be made about events that seem to have been thoroughly investigated.

CHAPTER ONE

Strategic Thought in America, 1952–1966

IN the 1950s, strategy emerged in the United States as a new field with a distinct intellectual personality. A small group of men—Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, Albert Wohlstetter, and a handful of others—working mainly at the RAND Corporation, had moved into an intellectually barren “no-man’s-land” traditionally neglected by both military officers and students of international politics.¹ The body of thought they created was very different from anything that had come before. Their ideas would prove to be enormously influential, and their style of analysis in large measure became the sophisticated way of approaching nuclear issues in the United States.

The aim here is not simply to offer yet another description of this body of thought. The real goal is to try to give some sense for how this intellectual tradition took the shape it did—what caused it to emerge, how the central ideas developed, and why, after an extraordinary period of intellectual productivity, these ideas by around 1966 or so seemed to have played themselves out. Why, in other words, did strategy hit something of a dead end in the late 1960s?

The focus will be on the basic tension that dominated the development of this set of ideas. It was as though the coming of the hydrogen bomb in 1952 had released two great shock waves in the world of strategic thought. There was on the one hand the fundamental point that when both the United States and the Soviet Union had obtained survivable and deliverable strategic forces, all-out war between these two powers would become an absurdity: with thermonuclear weapons, the overriding goal had to be to limit war—and in particular to reduce to a minimum the risk that the nuclear powers would launch massive attacks on each other’s cities. On the other hand, there was the equally basic notion that the threat of nuclear war could be used for political purposes that went well beyond deterring the use of nuclear weapons by an adversary. The idea that one could exploit the threat of escalation was a product of the early atomic age. But it was the coming of the hydrogen bomb that brought this problem into focus. Indeed, the way strategic thought developed— the very distinctive shape it came to have—was very much a product of the thermonuclear revolution.

It was not that separate factions rallied around each of these two poles: the history of American strategic thought during this period cannot be summed up as a dispute between those who believed in “simple deterrence” and those who wanted nuclear forces to play a more far-reaching political role. Strategic discourse during this period was not sectarian or doctrinaire: the striking thing was that the same people were attracted to both approaches, often at the same time. But these two basic ways of approaching strategy were in obvious conflict with each other. The fundamental question was whether there was any way this conflict could be resolved.

THE THERMONUCLEAR REVOLUTION

It is perhaps odd that the most important work on strategic issues was done in the 1950s and early 1960s—or, more precisely, in the period from 1952 to 1966. One might have thought that the coming of the atomic bomb in 1945 would have marked the watershed. But even as late as 1950 or 1951, concepts of strategic bombing that had emerged before and during the Second World War continued to provide an adequate framework for thinking about how an atomic war would be fought. The early atomic bombs were not so powerful that numbers and accuracy were no longer important. Defense against bombers could still make a difference; base location would remain important because of its effect on the intensity with which the bombing campaign could be carried out; and armies and navies would continue to play a significant role in defending those bases and perhaps in blunting an enemy counterattack. A new war, it was assumed, would be a war of attrition, a war of endurance. Thus, mobilization was still meaningful; it therefore still made sense militarily to try to destroy the enemy’s war-making capability by destroying his economy. In other words, the atomic bomb, as important as it was, had not rendered the existing conceptual framework obsolete, and this was true even after the Soviet Union had begun in 1949 to amass atomic forces of its own.²

In the early 1950s, however, the situation was to change dramatically. By the beginning of 1952, it had become clear to those in the know that a thermonuclear weapon with an explosive force a thousand times as great as the bombs dropped on Japan “was soon to be tested and that success was virtually certain.”³ Viewed in a somewhat broader context, the hydrogen bomb can be seen as simply the most awesome of a whole series of developments in nuclear weapons technology that were reaching a climax at the beginning of the 1950s. Fission bombs had by this time become smaller, lighter, mass-producible and more efficient in their use of fissionable material. Maximum yields of even pure fission weapons had increased dramatically, rising from the twelve kilotons of the Hiroshima bomb to a half-megaton in 1952. “Boosted” weapons, where part of the explosive power derived from a fusion reaction, and which were being developed at the same time, produced a yield in the one-megaton range.⁴ The result was that even if true thermonuclear weapons had never been deployed, the traditional basis for thinking about air warfare would in all probability eventually have been undermined.

In the minds of people at the time, however, the great revolution in military technology was dominated and symbolized by the huge thermonuclear explosives first tested in 1952. It is for this reason that the new conditions of warfare that were emerging in the early 1950s will be referred to here as the “thermonuclear revolution.” Certainly, for the small group of civilians at the RAND Corporation who had begun to think seriously about basic problems of nuclear strategy, it was the hydrogen bomb that marked the decisive break with the past.

Charles Hitch, for example, was at this time one of the leading figures at RAND, and in the summer of 1952 he and William Capron prepared a report on the implications of the new weapon. “We may,” they wrote, “be able to absorb a large number of A-bombs and recover, particularly if the targets selected are not optimal or if bombing accuracy is poor; we cannot stand fifty 25-MT bombs if they are well-placed and the results are not very sensitive to the placing.”⁵

Bernard Brodie, then also at RAND, was by this time arguing along similar lines. The ordinary atomic bomb, he said in a talk at the Air War College, was “not so absolute a weapon that we can disregard the limits of its destructive power.” One still had to be concerned with bombing accuracy and with the physical vulnerability of the target. But with the H-bomb, concerns of this sort would count for “astonishingly little.”⁶ What, however, did this imply about strategy? Simply that the basic aim had to be deterrence—that the overriding goal had to be to prevent war through the threat of retaliation? The problem was that such a threat could carry weight only if one were prepared to follow through on it. Peace would depend, Brodie had argued even in the late 1940s, on a universal conviction “that war is far too horrible even to be contemplated. And the great dilemma is that that conviction can be sustained only by our making every possible effort to prepare for war and thus to engage in it if need be.”⁷

The problem of deterrence could therefore not be divorced from the problem of use. What made this issue so difficult, Brodie stressed in 1952, was the realization that an atomic war would inevitably be a “two-way affair,” and an all-out war with thermonuclear weapons might well be tantamount to national suicide. It was obvious “that national objectives could not be consonant with national suicide.” Brodie had earlier thought that Clausewitz, with his insistence on the close linkage between political objectives and military means, had become obsolete: even the early atomic weapons were too destructive to be harnessed to rational political goals. But he had since come to see that Clausewitz had been “saying something very profound.” He had been saying that “war is violence—to be sure, gigantic violence—but it is planned violence and therefore controlled. And since the objective should be rational, the procedure for accomplishing that objective should also be rational, which is to say that the procedure and the objective must be in some measure appropriate to each other.” Brodie’s views had been moving in this direction even in 1949 and 1950. But the imminent arrival of the hydrogen bomb had made this sort of thinking particularly salient: a suicidal strategy could never be an appropriate means of supporting rational, political goals. It followed that one had to think about strategies that were not suicidal— that the means of violence had to be controlled and limited.⁸

Brodie’s problem in the early 1950s was to think out how the atomic bombs should actually be used in war, and in particular how the “threat value” of nuclear weapons could be exploited.⁹ What he objected to was the assumption that the bombing attack should be as swift, as concentrated and as massive as possible. The general idea that there might be a better way to use nuclear weapons than simply launching the kind of concentrated “atomic blitz” called for in the war plans had been actively discussed at RAND even in the late 1940s.¹⁰ But it was Brodie who gave the idea written expression; it was in fact to become a major theme in his writings. He laid out the argument, for example, in his paper, “Must We Shoot from the Hip?” which he wrote at RAND in late 1951. The aim, he said, should be to continue to exert pressure—and by that he meant political and psychological pressure—until the war reached a conclusion. But existing policy would make this impossible: “Under present conceptions, it is not too much to say that we shoot our bolt and then wait for something to happen, being then quite unable to affect what will happen.”¹¹

This was, however, more an argument that the level of violence should be controlled than that it should be limited. Brodie was not arguing at this point that urban-industrial targets should not be attacked except in retaliation for a similar attack on our own cities. He was simply arguing against what came to be called a “spasm” attack: the atomic offensive had to be conducted in a more deliberate way in order to serve basic political goals.

What exactly was new here? Limited war thinking, of course, had certain precursors in the late 1940s: there were various proposals aired at the time for outlawing the use of nuclear weapons, or at least for ruling out attacks on cities. But whatever appeal these simple limited war arguments had, the problem was that strategic bombing had emerged during the immediate postwar period as the dominant form of great power warfare. Given the technology of the late 1940s, and the resources that could be mobilized at the time, an air-atomic war was actually fightable: the devastation would be terrible, but the war could in theory be won and societies could survive even an unrestrained conflict of this sort. With the tremendous increase in the destructiveness of nuclear weaponry, however, the strategy of massive air bombardment of urban-industrial areas became, or was certainly well on the way to becoming, a victim of its own technical success. What was new, in other words, was the sense that in the very near future the level of devastation would be so incredibly great that unrestrained warfare no longer made any sense at all: there had to be some limit on the level of violence.

For Brodie in particular, the thermonuclear revolution marked an important watershed. In the early atomic age, he had not argued that we should hold back from using nuclear weapons—in general, or simply against an enemy’s cities—provided the enemy respected a similar set of restraints. Nor had he argued for major limited war-fighting capabilities. In his writings at the time, military efficiency was the main concern: the assumption was that if war came, one would use whatever one had. In 1948 he in fact made exactly the kind of argument that just a few years later he was to view as the height of unwisdom. “We cannot,” he said, “forever go on planning for two drastically different kinds of large-scale war. Considerations of economy and of getting the most possible fighting strength out of our military resources will dictate that we make up our minds at an early date whether or not we will use the bombs in war and adjust accordingly. There is not much doubt about what that decision will be, especially since the general expectation is that—failing the setting-up of an effective international control system—our major rival will begin to make atomic bombs within the next ten to twenty years.”¹² It was only the imminent arrival of thermonuclear weapons that forced him to consider whether there should be any limitation on the level of violence: it was the revolution in the means of warfare that brought about his break with the past. Objectives had to be limited, he said, because the means of warfare had to be limited, “and not the other way around.”¹³

But these two arguments—for war limitation, and for using the nuclear threat to support basic political goals—almost at once began to pull in opposite directions. Strategy, Brodie wrote in early 1952, should be concerned with “determining what not to hit as well as what to hit”; the central goal now was to figure out what could “be achieved by war, and in what way, other than by unloosing...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One: Strategic Thought in America, 1952–1966
• Chapter Two: The Coming of the First World War: A Reassessment
• Chapter Three: A “Wasting Asset”: American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949–1954
• Chapter Four: The Nuclearization of NATO and U.S.—West European Relations
• Chapter Five: The Berlin Crisis
• Chapter Six: The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis
• Chapter Seven: Making Sense of the Nuclear Age
• Appendix: Key to Abbreviations in Chapter Five
• Index