The Crisis in Western Security

Lawrence S. Hagen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000262759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book, first published in 1982, examines the crisis of détente in Europe and between the superpowers, the crisis in arms control, and the heightening of tensions within NATO, and analyses the central precepts of Western policy and thought in these areas. These crises are examined in terms of the trends, thought and action in the area of Western security. In particular, the concept of strategic stability, the assumptions behind arms control, and between arms control and security policy, are critically analysed.

1
ON THE LOGIC OF SECURITY AND ARMS CONTROL IN THE NATO ALLIANCE

Philip Windsor

What is arms control, in terms of the intellectual consensus which had its origins in the strategic culture of the 1960s, particularly in the United States? It is, at bottom, an attempt to create a fundamental and mutual Superpower understanding about the stabilisation of deterrence. This effort at strategic consensus-building is not simply a pedagogical exercise directed towards a shared comprehension of the implications for conflict of the relative configurations of weapons systems on either side. Rather it is an attempt to derive from those technical relationships a degree of political consensus about the way in which those weapons are to be continuously used in terms of the maintenance of the peace — in other words, ‘crisis stability’; a logic of Superpower relations is constructed from a logic of conflict. For example, it is still the case in Europe that on most days of the week throughout the year, aircraft take off on opposing sides in the early afternoon, proceed towards each other, and then turn north as they meet along the East-West German frontier around the Elbe, returning to their respective airfields. They are signalling not simply that they share an understanding of the technological capacity of these aircraft in times of war, but that they know what purpose continuing confrontation serves; it has become, within the terms of our political understanding, almost as ceremonial as the changing of the guard outside Buckingham Palace. In this sense, the political understanding of the configuration of weapons systems is an essential part of talking about arms control. But one of the difficulties which has emerged from the evolution of the practice and theory of arms control is, perhaps, more central to the current impasse: arms control itself has come to be seen as a means of creating that political understanding rather than a reflection of an already existing consensus.

This instrumental nature of arms control follows in a certain sense from the logic of deterrence. Strategic thinkers and practitioners have been preoccupied above all else with the construction and continued operation of a secure deterrent; questions concerning the credibility of a deterrent posture and the preferability of a second strike compared to a first strike doctrine and capability have pervaded strategic discussion. Having followed a relatively simple path of logic in answering these questions, one can begin to understand — or assume — that if the other side also arrives at similar conclusions on the basis of similar concerns and calculations, strategic stability creates a semi-autonomous set of criteria of its own, which in turn act to reinforce a set of political relations. And so the attempt to create an arms control condominium from the logical — and psychological — implications of the various conflicts which have transpired between the Superpowers and their allies becomes, in and of itself, a form of political thinking through the mechanism of a mutually reinforcing Superpower relationship.

This is not to suggest that the logic which has come to inform the relationship between arms control thinking and the wider range of political relationships was a product of deliberate intent at its inception. On the contrary, the original functional, technical approach to arms control questions was an approach which was self-consciously designed to be divorced from the political considerations which have since come to encumber it. However, having appropriated for itself a functional status which sought to accentuate and perpetuate a degree of intellectual and political autonomy, it then became clear that this independence could itself become an instrument for the creation of political understanding precisely because of this independence.

The paradoxical consequences of this structural situation began to emerge in the particular environment of crisis in the relationship between detente and arms control in Europe during 1968. At that time, three types of conflict came to ahead. First, there was a conflict about the meaning of detente. The Superpowers seemed to be engaged in an effort to stabilise and strengthen a certain status quo — territorial and political — utilising the manifest implications of deterrence stability as a lever to arrive at a wider, supporting consensus at other levels; the Europeans, on the other hand, sought to use that very stability to promote the peaceful alteration of the status quo. Secondly, there was also considerable debate about what constituted the essence of strategic stability, reflected in the debate on ballistic missile defence in the United States, and the first steps towards negotiating limits on strategic weaponry. Finally, there were conflicts which brought the first two categories of debate together in another difference of interpretation: whether political change in Europe could be accompanied by strategic stabilisation through agreement between East and West. All three questions seemed to be answered by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. That action put paid to the hopes of Europeans that political change could, indeed, accompany strategic stability. On the contrary, the Russian tanks argued that political change which threatened the self-defined central values of one Superpower could not be married with the effort to secure strategic stability; the latter could only be maintained by ensuring the maintenance of political stability, which in turn meant no change.

The reaction of the United States to this situation was fundamentally a drawn-out, complicated, soul-searching affair, in which the Administration initially postponed the SALT talks, the initiation of which it had already agreed to. (If one senses a certain similarity here to what occurred in relation to the ratification of the SALT II treaty, this is more coincidental than real.) The delay in the commencement of the SALT I talks was accompanied by a recognition that strategic arms control could no longer be seen only as functional in terms of the stabilisation of the deterrence structure; they would also be inevitably functional in terms of the creation of a new political relationship. Thus the SALT process, initially perceived as a means of getting away from politics, paradoxically became central to the construction and management of an emerging Superpower detente. Indeed, Secretary of Defense McNamara directed the first American negotiators at SALT to spend their early sessions discussing not hardware problems or issues of arms race and technical stability, but rather the philosophy of deterrence and the building of a common universe of conceptual, almost metaphysical, understanding which could then serve as the means of approaching both more narrow technical questions and questions of a political nature.

In Europe, the effect of the invasion of Czechoslovakia was equally profound. The early pattern of detente on the continent — epitomised by the approach of President de Gaulle — had been characterised by a strategy whereby the European states were able and willing to exploit a relative degree of stability in Superpower relations by trying to encourage a greater degree of freedom of action in Eastern Europe. This gave way, in 1968, to a type of approach more easily identified with the name of Willy Brandt than President de Gaulle. It was, in essence, like a prolonged and skilful exposition of the art of Ju-Jitsu: the great weight of the Soviet Union was thrown on its back by the smaller power, who made it clear that if the USSR was serious in its desire to negotiate successfully with the Federal Republic of Germany over certain points of legitimacy and geography — such as post-war borders and the status of Berlin — and improve its economic ties with the West, then the interests of Bonn in creating a ‘dynamic status quo’ in East Germany, and Eastern Europe more generally, would have to be recognised. Brandt’s dynamic status quo was one in which the issues of security would be compartmentalised from those of political and economic interchange; the former would remain relatively static while the latter would be legitimate ground for movement and change over an indeterminate period of time. Thus, the detente of Willy Brandt was a beneficiary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia as were the SALT negotiations, through the medium of American reaction and reassessment.

When the SALT negotiations began in 1969, there emerged a vision of the nature and purpose of arms control which did not derive from its functional base, and where that functional base was transfigured into the form of an attempt at generating political understanding. The narrower instrumentalities of arms control became the vicarious vehicles for dealing with a whole range of broader European — and global — issues. Throughout the period during which the SALT I treaty was negotiated, the United States became increasingly self-conscious of its use of SALT for broader purposes; President Nixon’s State of the World Message to Congress, for example, explicitly advised the Soviet Union of the connections which would be drawn between Soviet (non-) accommodation in the Middle East, and progress at SALT. SALT and other arms control fora became a holding operation whose major purpose was to serve as a guarantor of a particular strategic order, on the one hand, and an institution whose value to both Superpowers would allow changes, on the other hand. This relationship between order and change became a fluid and self-transforming dynamic which was worked out through the SALT process, as both states utilised these negotiations and their linkage to other issues as a tool for the establishment of what fell under the rubric of essential ‘order’, and what lay in the domain of permissible ‘change’.

SALT, in other words, became increasingly political, and for a time it seemed to succeed — for both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ reasons. The United States could persevere in its intended mandate for SALT so long as it was strategically superior in most categories; Soviet inferiority created incentives for the apparent fulfilment of American negotiating objectives in, for example, the Middle East, where a clear US advantage in MIRV technology may be seen as having allowed a successful linkage of SALT with issues of regional security and Superpower behaviour. However, the continued achievement of American aims was predicated on more basic — and questionable — presmisses: the understanding that if the Soviet Union was engaged in the vast political dialogue of which the United States understood that SALT was the centrepiece, then the Soviet Union would accept that SALT was the centrepiece as well. This, however, might hold only so long as the US was possessed of a very clear edge of strategic superiority.

But that superiority has, of course, disappeared, or at least become less a canon than a point of strategic debate. Comparatively simple questions of weapons configurations are turning into questions of different categories, in which the inherent tensions of deterrence are posing new questions of credibility and stability. Being superior in one category has come to mean inferiority in another — as with theatre nuclear forces — while the existence of stability in one functional or geographical area can mean creating the risk of instability in another — as with inter-continental parity and peripheral conflict. In consequence, the attempt to preserve — or indeed create — a balance between order and change has become increasingly difficult to maintain, just as the secular trends which must be managed have themselves made that task more onerous. This process of Superpower strategic overload began in the early 1970s, perhaps during the 1973 Middle East war, and while it took some time for objective change, in Marxist terms, to become subjective change, the world has been living with its consequences ever since.

Prior to examining the implications of this breakdown, however, it might be useful to briefly examine some of the criteria by which this process can be seen to have occurred. It was a basic premiss of classical strategic and arms control thinking that the nature of strategic stability was easily ascertained and that, indeed, this constituted an ‘objective’ element of the nuclear universe to which all else could be related. It only remained, therefore, to ‘educate’ both sides as to the truth of the matter; any difficulties to be encountered were likely to arise primarily through the negotiating process — the means — rather than the end itself. Thus parity was seen to be an empirical criteria by which to judge the existence, or lack thereof, of stability, and the American SALT negotiators argued for the institutionalisation of this concept through the arms control process. This argument was conducted through an exquisite, increasingly etiolated, ptolemaic logic in which epicycle after epicycle of technological change was brought into a kind of cosmos of overall strategic stability, despite the fact that there was no parity in any conceivable category whatsoever. This relationship between parity and stability, however, was defended not simply in terms of what one side could in fact ‘do’ to the other in purely technological terms, but more importantly in terms of the perceptions of political tensions which arose from relating parity to stability.

But the relationship between the criterion — parity — and the value — stability — is more complicated than this. For example, at the early stages, one of the prime instruments of strategic instability was very clearly ABM technology. Thus, the fear that ABMs could encourage a first-strike posture helped lead to a quick SALT I accord. But are ABMs destabilising when, due to initial backwardness of technology, a capability is then developed to destroy a large percentage of the other side’s land-based missile force as a consequence of subsequent technological advances? Might it not be argued that the same criteria which argued in favour of ABM limitation at a particular state in relative technological development now argue in favour of the possession of a limited ABM capability by one side to remedy the disadvantageous — and destabilising — changes in relative weapons quality and quantity which have since transpired. In this sense, the relationship between parity and stability, and what, indeed, constitute the proper instruments of stability are constantly changing, doing violence to the static conceptions which have been enshrined in arms control dogma and institutions.

These developments might have been manageable if there existed a stable political context within which to discuss such questions. But this context has itself become less stable precisely because of the success of the initial assumptions of SALT. SALT did create a degree of agreement on strategic stand-off between the two Superpowers, which in turn acted to preclude at least some measure of the risk of going to nuclear war. It also, thereby, increased two kinds of potential danger. First, in peripheral areas, as the Soviet Union began to redress its technological position vis-á-vis the United States at the strategic level, it began to feel freer to act at lower levels of violence and commitments to values than those which comported the risk of nuclear war. About four years ago, I was asked by a Soviet Colonel-General what I thought had been the most important change in international politics over the previous few years. Failing to supply the correct answer to this question, the visitor said, ‘No, the most important change that has taken place is that we are no longer afraid of you.’ He was articulating a qualitative change in the psychological response of the Soviet Union to its environment; part of that response was the recognition that strategic parity was being secured, and that Soviet advantages in other areas at different levels could now be exploited with greater ease, flexibility and freedom than had been the case in the past. Thus the first product — and problem — of a successful SALT was that by creating at least the promise of strategic stability, it simultaneously created the danger of the exploitation of instability at lesser levels, and thereby the multiplication of global conflicts in contexts which until that moment had had very little to do with arms control. The Middle East, Africa and South-West Asia are all now more open to greater instability through the very stability initially created by SALT.

The second category of danger follows from the first. To what extent can the maintenance of a central political relationship, which in turn reinforces strategic stability, be a priority for two states which are engaged in serious competitions over a series of other questions? Both the USSR and USA, preoccupied with direct and indirect contests over political influence, natural resources, and ideological legitimacy, are locked in an overall confrontation which engages the very nature of what it is to be a Superpower. Moreover, the fundamental asymmetry in attributes of the two states may encourage the Soviet Union — technologically weak, economically in decline, and ideologically on the defensive — to compensate for such forms of weakness in that dimension of strength which it posesses in full measure: military power. Furthermore, that military power is increasingly capable of successful operation at lower levels of violence than those which involve the risk of nuclear war. In this sense, such a Superpower may be tempted to exploit change and disturbance in the world which will not threaten SALT because the other Superpower insists that they should not threaten SALT.

So, during the SALT II negotiations, increasing trends in favour of political change and instability converged with the very period when the United States was endeavouring with accelerating vigour to secure an agreement. Gradually, the SALT process itself became hostage to the political process which it was originally designed to create. In consequence, questions multiplied in Washington about whether the United States should proceed with SALT in a period where the context of political change and the very nature of the Superpower relationship was making for increasing instability. So the whole connection between SALT and the broader process of international relations has turned turtle. Originally, other political relations were hostage to SALT; SALT has now become hostage to other political relations. Compounding these developments, all this has been going on precisely when the criteria of strategic stability are becoming progressively harder to identify and objectify through international agreement. At the time the SALT II treaty was reached, it was generally accepted that it was practically irrelevant to any of the significant technological changes occurring in the strategic competition between the two Super-powers. The stability of SALT itself has thereby fallen prey to technological flux in a manner which yields to a variable form of unstable dependence on the nature of the political relations between Moscow and Washington.

It is with this context in mind that recent developments in European security must be evaluated. Helmut Schmidt, in his 1977 Alastair Buchan Memorial Lecture at the IISS, suggested — perhaps with a touch of hyperbole — that the existence and imminence of SALT agreements could make the question of grey-area weapons and confrontations in Europe increasingly problematic. To the extent that strategic stand-off is successfully negotiated and embodied in international agreement, all the old questions of strategic credibility and escalation dominance would acquire a heightened urgency.

West Europe has never developed a methodology for dealing with questions arising from the military relationship between the two halves of the continent. This has its origins in the 1950s, when the West European abjured from the sacrifices required to invest the money and manpower necessary to mount a credible conventional defence; it was clearly preferable to whistle up the inexpensive alternative of American nuclear and air power. At that time, these states congratulated themselves for the effectiveness with which they had tied the United States to the defence of Europe. The result today is that as Washington is confronted with more and more insurmountable difficulties in the defence of Europe, partly through strategic parity and partly through Soviet theatre superiority, so the Western powers have found themselves virtually incapable — spiritually and materially — of creating any form of Western defence policy whatsoever.

The concept of ‘credibility’ is still a key criterion because Europeans, in characteristically logical manner, rightly wonder what America would be able or prepared to risk doing on behalf of Western Europe. But the European defence dilemma has been intensified by the posture adopted by NATO for the defence of Germany between 1955 and 1957. It could well be argued that a strategic position which did not run East-West but ran North-South would give the Europeans more room for tactical manoeuvres, more warning time in which to deal with the threat and possibility of a Soviet or Warsaw Pact attack, and greater flexibility through the multiplication of options, but this possibility was eschewed for political reasons, and because of the manner in which Germany joined NATO. The result is the perpetual raising of that fundamental yet foolish question, ‘When do we go nuclear, and how far does the enemy have to go before that decision is made?’ This question is obviou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Contemporary Strategic Relations and the Dissolution of Detente
• 1. On the Logic of Security and Arms Control in the NATO Alliance
• 2. Arms Control: The Possibility of a Second Coming
• 3. Arms Control and Western Security: A Question of Growing Irrelevance
• 4. Nuclear Arms Control and Europe: The Enduring Dilemma
• 5. Arms Control and European Security: Some Basic Issues
• 6. The Future of the Strategic Balance
• 7. Technology, Deterrence and the NATO Alliance
• 8. NATO and Long-range Theatre Nuclear Weapons: Background and Rationale
• 9. Who is Decoupling From Whom? Or This Time, the Wolf is Here
• 10. East-West Relations and the Politics of Security
• 11. Military Power and Arms Control: Towards a Reassessment
• Notes on Contributors
• Index