No Use

Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security

Thomas M. Nichols

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812209068
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For more than forty years, the United States has maintained a public commitment to nuclear disarmament, and every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama has gradually reduced the size of America's nuclear forces. Yet even now, over two decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States maintains a huge nuclear arsenal on high alert and ready for war. The Americans, like the Russians, the Chinese, and other major nuclear powers, continue to retain a deep faith in the political and military value of nuclear force, and this belief remains enshrined at the center of U.S. defense policy regardless of the radical changes that have taken place in international politics.In No Use, national security scholar Thomas M. Nichols offers a lucid, accessible reexamination of the role of nuclear weapons and their prominence in U.S. security strategy. Nichols explains why strategies built for the Cold War have survived into the twenty-first century, and he illustrates how America's nearly unshakable belief in the utility of nuclear arms has hindered U.S. and international attempts to slow the nuclear programs of volatile regimes in North Korea and Iran. From a solid historical foundation, Nichols makes the compelling argument that to end the danger of worldwide nuclear holocaust, the United States must take the lead in abandoning unrealistic threats of nuclear force and then create a new and more stable approach to deterrence for the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1

Nuclear Strategy, 1950–1990: The Search for Meaning

Senator Glenn. I got lost in what is credible and not credible. This whole thing gets so incredible when you think about wiping out whole nations.

Secretary Brown. That is why we sound a little crazy when we talk about it.

—Defense Secretary Harold Brown and Senator John Glenn during U.S. Senate hearings, 1980

“Weapons in Search of a Doctrine”

Nuclear weapons, as Henry Kissinger often remarked during the Cold War, are weapons continually in search of a doctrine. The history of the evolution of nuclear strategy in the United States, as in the other nuclear powers, is a story of the ongoing attempt to find political meaning and military relevance in weapons so destructive that they defeat traditional notions about strategy and the use of force in international affairs. As early as 1946, the American strategic thinker Bernard Brodie wrote that nuclear weapons represented the “end of strategy,” since any attempt at strategic reasoning collapsed in the face of the twin facts that nuclear weapons existed and were unimaginably powerful.¹ The question that arose after the first detonation of a nuclear bomb in the summer of 1945 remains today: What do nuclear weapons actually do?

Nearly seven decades later, there is still no American consensus on this question. Scholars, security analysts, civilian policymakers, and military leaders all continue to be divided over whether nuclear arms exist to fight wars, or to prevent wars—or whether the readiness to fight increases or decreases the likelihood of having to fight at all. In 1984, Robert Jervis, echoing Brodie, charged that a “rational strategy for the employment of nuclear weapons is a contradiction in terms. The enormous destructive power of these weapons creates insoluble problems,” and thus the history of nuclear strategy “has been a series of attempts to find a way out of this predicament and return to the simpler, more comforting pre-nuclear world.”² Other strategists during the Cold War rejected this kind of thinking as defeatism; Colin Gray wrote in a 1979 reflection on Brodie’s work that even in the most terrifying circumstances, there is still “a role for strategy—that is, for the sensible, politically directed application of military power in thermonuclear war.”³

Those debates continue to the present day, but they cannot be understood without examining the Cold War efforts that preceded them. The world-destroying strategies conjured by the professional strategists, “the Wizards of Armageddon,” in Fred Kaplan’s famous phrase, are largely relics of the past, relegated to history by the generations who lived through the Cold War and regarded as curiosities by younger generations who did not.⁴ Nonetheless, the theories that animated the work of the Cold War strategists remain at the foundation of current thinking about nuclear issues.

The 1950s: “At Times and Places of Our Own Choosing”

For the first few years after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States did not have a nuclear “strategy” so much as it had a nuclear “problem.” American leaders had difficulty comprehending the enormity of their new super-weapon; while they saw the devastation visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these were relatively small, one-sided attacks that were retribution for a surprise attack, four years of war, and hundreds of thousands of U.S. casualties. The first two nuclear bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, inflicted a huge amount of destruction in moments, but the damage was still comparable to the ruin inflicted in slow-motion over weeks of relentless firebombing, and both of the afflicted Japanese cities still stand today.

Within years of Japan’s defeat, however, nuclear delivery systems became more reliable and nuclear bombs became vastly more powerful. In short order, nuclear attack was no longer even remotely comparable to a strategic bombing campaign. Instead, policymakers had to think about the instant and complete destruction of dozens of major cities from long distances, a horrifying concept never before encountered in the study or practice of war.

The essence of the American problem in this first decade after World War II was that unarguable nuclear superiority did not seem to buy very much security, especially in Europe. The newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization faced the conventional superiority of a Communist coalition that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Worse, the Western nuclear arsenal (Britain’s first bomb was detonated in 1952) did not seem to imbue the Soviet Union with any greater sense of caution: nuclear weapons did not thwart Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s gambles in Berlin, nor did they prevent the invasion of South Korea. The Americans and their allies, as Lawrence Freedman later wrote, felt they were “being forced into fighting the [Cold War] and would have to fight any future hot war according to ground rules laid down by the communists.”⁵ Years later, revelations from Soviet archives and interviews of former Soviet policymakers would show that the Soviets were in fact acutely conscious of the danger of war and particularly of nuclear war.⁶ But Stalin himself, bolstered by the crushing victory over the Nazis and the acquisition of a new European empire, was nonetheless willing to run significant risks even in the face of a nuclear near-monopoly.⁷

The U.S. solution at the time was the strategy of “Massive Retaliation,” first described in a 1953 U.S. National Security Council paper and enunciated publicly a year later in more detail by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. President Dwight Eisenhower’s initial “New Look” at strategy affirmed that nuclear weapons would be essential to repulse a Soviet attack on the U.S. and NATO. Dulles went farther, and warned that the utility of nuclear arms extended beyond the battlefield: they could even act as a general strategic deterrent. That is, a U.S. nuclear attack on a grand scale—“Massive Retaliation”—against the USSR or its allies would henceforth be the price for any kind of Soviet or Communist-sponsored aggression, anywhere in the world.

No longer would the Americans try to match the USSR man for man and pound for pound. Instead, Washington would try to exploit its nuclear superiority by using it to deter Soviet aggression. Moscow was put on notice that any major offenses (however they might be defined) by the USSR or its proxies against the Western allies would result in the United States exercising its “great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of [America’s] choosing.”⁸

The Americans really had little choice at the time. Even with mass conscription or huge increases in defense spending, there was no way to fight the Communist bloc on its own terms. Outmanned and outgunned, the West had no hope of protecting every possible corner of the earth from a hemispheric Sino-Soviet alliance. Korea, where Western arms had restored the status quo only by a whisker, was proof enough of that. Allowing the East to dictate the terms of every engagement would be disastrous. “If the enemy,” Dulles said in 1954, “could pick his time and his place and method of warfare—and if our policy was to remain the traditional one of meeting aggression by direct and local opposition—then we needed to be ready to fight in the Arctic and the tropics, in Asia, in the Near East and in Europe; by sea, by land, by air; by old weapons and by new weapons.”⁹ Massive Retaliation was an asymmetric solution to this asymmetric dilemma, with nuclear weapons threatened as the dire punishment that Western conventional forces could not guarantee.

As a concept, Massive Retaliation was simplicity itself. As an actual strategy, however, it lacked clarity and credibility. The most obvious and logical question centered on the nuclear threshold. What might trigger U.S. retaliation? An invasion of Europe, certainly, but beyond that? Aggression in Indochina? Soviet abuse of its own allies? Proxy warfare conducted by a third power? Massive Retaliation was a hammer, not a scalpel, and it could not be tailored for anything much less than a direct, punishing attack on the Soviet Union. The Americans themselves were not sure where the nuclear lines were drawn, as there were simply too many scenarios to contemplate. It is one thing to induce uncertainty in the opponent; it is another entirely to share that uncertainty. (As we will see in Chapter 4, the United States replicated this mistake four decades later in trying to gain political leverage from its nuclear arsenal against rogue states after the Cold War.)

The true Achilles’ heel of the whole strategy, however, was that it rested on the inherently unsustainable condition of U.S. nuclear superiority. Massive Retaliation, a deeply flawed concept from the outset, could only last until the USSR developed the ability to retaliate in kind. Soviet leaders accordingly developed a missile-centric doctrine focused on a swift and secure retaliatory capability. In 1960, the USSR established the Strategic Rocket Forces, described by the Soviet defense minister at the time as “unquestionably the main service of the Armed Forces.”¹⁰ America’s threats of nuclear punishment after 1960 would now have to be made in the teeth of an inevitable Soviet nuclear response, and Soviet-era authors themselves accurately described Massive Retaliation as defunct by 1960.

Massive Retaliation, never fully conceptualized and never executed, in short order became obsolete in the face of new Soviet capabilities. In the end, “Massive Retaliation” was less a strategy than an expression of desperation, and it could not last into the missile age.

The 1960s and the Rise of the Strategists

As the Soviet arsenal grew in both size and capability, U.S. leaders tried to salvage some sense of purpose for their own rapidly increasing nuclear stockpile. The American capacity to destroy the USSR with impunity was out of reach by the time President John F. Kennedy took office in 1960; he was told bluntly (and correctly) by his military advisors that even if the United States launched everything it had at every possible Soviet, Chinese, and Eastern European target, some portion of the Soviet arsenal was certain to survive and inflict horrifying amounts of damage on North America.¹¹ Accordingly, nuclear strategy became a more evenly matched, two-sided game between the United States and the Soviet Union.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was determined in this period to wrest control of nuclear issues away from the military, whose approach to nuclear strategy consisted largely of making operational plans to match weapons to targets.¹² Nuclear targeting was no small enterprise in itself; by the mid-1970s, U.S. nuclear war planners had marked 40,000 potential targets for nuclear destruction in the Soviet bloc.¹³ But targeting is not the same thing as “strategy,” and McNamara wanted decisions over nuclear issues vested in a growing class of civilian defense analysts and policy intellectuals. This set the stage for the rise of the U.S. nuclear strategists, who would generate the many scenarios and strategies that dominated American nuclear thinking well into the 1980s.

Military control of nuclear strategy was undesirable, but the arrival of the civilian strategists was no less problematic. Soon, the nuclear enterprise represented the worst of both worlds, with both military officers and civilian analysts melded into a single community of nuclear experts. To be sure, the Americans (and others) needed to develop greater expertise on nuclear questions, but the unique tribe of defense specialists that emerged in the 1960s soon developed their own language, culture, and customs, which contributed to a growing gulf between theory and policy.

The dispassionate analysis of the use of nuclear weapons, for example, required a new vocabulary, a kind of nuclear Newspeak. Expressions such as “launch on warning” and “counterforce” entered the lexicon, and terms such as “collateral damage” took on significantly amplified meaning. As Kaplan put it, the strategists “performed their calculations and spoke in their strange and esoteric tongues because to do otherwise would be to recognize, all too clearly and constantly, the ghastliness of their contemplations.”¹⁴ Much like taking a person through the classic stages of grief, thinkers such as Herman Kahn insisted that Americans had to move past denial and anger, and reach acceptance of the nuclear age. This process entailed calmly thinking through horrific scenarios in which millions of people would die and entire nations would be pulverized.¹⁵ Kahn and other strategists pressed U.S. policymakers to think about the question posed in academic articles and quickly satirized in pop culture landmarks such as Dr. Strangelove: do we prefer 20 million dead or 100 million dead?

As soulless or amoral as it might appear, this kind of strategic theorizing served the necessary purpose of allowing ordinary human beings to think about extraordinary situations. Just as euphemism and scientific language assist medical doctors and other professionals in studying their specializations even as they wrestle with the heartbreaking suffering and eventual death of their charges—“pain management” and “end-of-life issues,” as they are now gently called—so too did the detached and clinical language of the new strategists enable the contemplation of conflicts of a scale that would dwarf all the wars ever fought in human history.

There was, however, both a moral and an intellectual corrosiveness to this increasingly professionalized approach to nuclear strategy. It may have been necessary to “think about the unthinkable,” but soon what was once unthinkable became an ordinary part of U.S. and Soviet national security policies. Military officers and civilian bureaucrats routinized the work of nuclear war planning, often in isolation from the rest of the defense community. This insularity, as Kaplan later wrote, allowed the nuclear theologians to avoid the reality that their efforts always led back to the same dead-end:

In the absence of any reality that was congenial to their abstract theorizing, the strategists in power treated the theory as if it were reality. For those mired in thinking about it all day, every day, in the corridors of officialdom, nuclear strategy had become the stuff of a living dreamworld. This mixture of habit, inertia, analytical convenience and fantasy was fueled by a peculiar logic as well. It was, after all, only rational to try to keep a nuclear war limited if one ever broke out…. Yet over the years, despite endless studies, nobody could find any options that seemed practical or made sense. [emphasis original]¹⁶

Much like the aridity that came to characterize too much of the social sciences after they embraced “scientific” approaches in the 1970s, so too did the analysis of nuclear strategy quickly become distanced from what policymakers could reasonably comprehend. Looking back at the various briefings and scenarios for war presented to U.S. leaders, Senator Sam Nunn later said: “You can sit around and read all the analytical stuff in the world, but once we start firing battlefield nuclear weapons, I don’t think anybody knew.”¹⁷ The theorists could pontificate and the war gamers could run their exercises, but as the numbers of weapons grew, the mathematics of nuclear war soon defied the imagination, just as the choices involved challenged the limits of moral reasoning.¹⁸

Both superpowers accelerated their acquisition of nuclear arms at remarkable rates. The United States alone managed to construct more than 30,000 weapons by 1967, only twenty-two years after the first nuclear test. The Soviet arsenal, too, was growing almost geometrically, and both sides soon commanded a host of delivery options that ranged from artillery shells to multiple-warhead ballistic missiles based on land and under the sea.

At these levels of numbers, what use were nuclear threats? Ironically, since every scenario for a major exchange led down the same path of annihilation, the U.S. and Soviet heartlands were now safer from direct assault, since neither side could chance a first strike. The sneak attack scenario feared in the 1950s—the so-called “BOOB,” or “bolt out of the blue,” attack—was no longer possible: a first-strike could neither disarm the victim nor save the attacker. The much greater complication, with North America itself now vulnerable to Soviet weapons, was not whether the United States could defend itself, but whether the Americans would risk nucl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction. Why Nuclear Weapons Still Matter
• 1. Nuclear Strategy, 1950–1990: The Search for Meaning
• 2. Nuclear Weapons After the Cold War: Promise and Failure
• 3. The Return of Minimum Deterrence
• 4. Small States and Nuclear War
• Conclusion. The Price of Nuclear Peace
• Notes
• Index