Stalin’s death in March 1953 undoubtedly had a liberating effect on Soviet strategic thought. Under Stalin, the military had been permitted little more than the incantation of official dogmas concerning Permanently Operating Factors and the selective study of their own wartime campaigns to find instances of these factors at work. All things that were difficult to explain in the past, which might undermine complacency in the present or lead to loss of confidence in the future, were ignored. In September 1953, Major General Talensky published in the officers’ journal Military Thought, which he edited, an article entitled ‘On the questions of the laws of military science’. In tentative language, Talensky argued for a military science concerned with the waging of wars and based on laws independent of those believed to be governing the socio-historical process. In principle the laws of war would apply equally to the armies of both capitalist and socialist societies.
This view challenged the supposition that socialist societies gained imposing military strengths simply by being socialist. In another heresy, Stalin’s Permanently Operating Factors were demoted. They could not be considered laws of war, nor could it be assumed that a socialist state was inevitably superior in each of these factors. Talensky also hinted at a major departure from past dicta by suggesting that ‘surprise’ may not be quite so ‘temporary’ a factor as Stalin had insisted. ‘Victory in modern war is attained by the decisive defeat of the enemy in the course of the armed conflict through the employment of successive blows accumulating in force’, he wrote; adding that this ‘formulation does not exclude the possibility of a decisive defeat in a limited time of one or another opponent, given the existence of certain conditions’. Eventually it became possible to discuss the factor of surprise in more directly.1 For now even though he had adopted such a cryptic formulation, Talensky was still criticized for paying insufficient regard to the Permanently Operating Factors. There were indications that official opinion was not prepared to endorse his views. In 1954, he was relieved of his position as editor. A more radical article by General Rotmistrov, ‘On the role of surprise in contemporary war’, was held back by the new editors. In February 1955 when Marshal Zhukov became Minister of Defence, as his reward for helping the Khrushchev-Bulganin faction displace Malenkov at the top of the Soviet hierarchy, the atmosphere changed. Zhukov was well aware of the parlous and obsolescent state of Soviet military science. The month before his appointment, at a meeting of leading staff of the armed forces, he had advocated ‘a thorough study of modern military technology and advanced military theory’.
The immediate publication of Rotmistrov’s article, followed two months later by another authored by Lieutenant General Shatilov, signalled the change.2 Here slavish obeisance to the Permanently Operating Factors was mocked, and Rotmistrov asserted that ‘In the situation of the employment of atomic and hydrogen weapons, surprise is one of the decisive conditions for the attainment of success not only in battles and operations but also in the war as a whole’. He did, however, emphasize that it was not the only condition. The ‘operations of the ground forces’ would ‘also decide the outcome of war’.3
In March 1955, under Zhukov’s guidance, the editors of Military Thought effectively concluded the debate that Talensky had begun. They criticized themselves for holding back Rotmistrov’s article and called for more creativity in thought and less commitment to the memory of Stalin’s writings. Credence was given to the new emphasis on the importance of surprise. The official line had changed. The Permanently Operating Factors as an explanation for the dynamics of armed conflict was derided, though the potential significance of the individual factors was still recognized. By 1956, the term had been dropped from Soviet strategic writings.
In this reappraisal of Soviet strategy the whole question of surprise attack assumed considerable importance. There were a number of reasons for this. The refusal to attribute any significant benefits to surprise had been the hallmark of the old strategy and was thus an inevitable target for revisionists. In Stalinist hagiography, the sudden German invasion of 1941 had been characterized as a ‘failure’ because it had not resulted in an ultimate ‘victory’. The Soviet Generals knew how close to victory the Germans had come, were aware that their country could have been and should have been better prepared to meet this attack, and that the price for this lack of preparedness had been extremely high in lives of Soviet soldiers and citizens.
There had never been any doubt that surprise could influence the course of a particular engagement. It was possible to downgrade surprise as a strategic factor so long as it could be demonstrated that no single military operation could determine the outcome of a war. With the quantum jumps in destructive power brought about by atomic energy this was becoming more difficult to demonstrate. Insisting that the Soviet Union could always survive now seemed dubious. The gratifying growth in Soviet nuclear power promised one method of meeting this threat—deterrence. If the imperialists could be persuaded that the Soviet Union would respond in kind they might think twice before launching aggression.
When Stalin died nuclear weapons were still a curiously unmentionable subject. The new leadership began to find out more. An article on the H-Bomb written by the New York Times science correspondent, which described its alarming effects, was given a ‘top secret’ classification and circulated only to 23 senior party and government leaders. The new Prime Minister, Georgi Malenkov, was sufficiently impressed that in his March 1954 ‘election’ speech he said a nuclear war could mean ‘the destruction of world civilization’.4 The idea was floated that the strength of the socialist camp might now bring peace to the world because it had ‘sobered’ the imperialists by reminding them of their own vulnerability. Malenkov and his associates put it about that the danger of war had receded and improved relations with the West were necessary.5 By improving ties with the West, it was believed, the Soviet Union would be able to reorient its economy away from heavy industry and military production towards agriculture and consumer goods.6
Malenkov’s predictions appear to have been too pacifistic for his colleagues and contradicted the accepted party line that ‘hydrogen weapons in the hands of the Soviet Union are a means of deterring aggression and waging peace’.7 Even though Russian scientists confirmed the essential truth of his observations on world destruction, they were still used against Malenkov when he was ousted from his position in January 1955, to be replaced by Khrushchev and Bulganin. His remarks were denounced as demoralising. Ideologically the position was still that any war must end with imperialism’s defeat. Claiming that the Americans could be effectively deterred forever contradicted what was claimed to be a law of history: that war was an inevitable concomitant of capitalism and that a showdown between the capitalist and socialist camps was destined to happen at some point. Moreover, in such a war capitalism would be the inevitable loser, whether or not nuclear weapons were involved. Stating that war could involve the destruction of world civilization suggested that instead of it being the occasion for the triumph of socialism it could be the moment of its demise; its last stage along with that of capitalism. Such a proposition involved not only the suspension of a law of history but the end of history itself.
Malenkov’s mistake was not so much ideological revisionism but being premature in his assessment of the logic of the nuclear age. The view of his group was that the Soviet Union now possessed ‘everything necessary to guard the peaceful toil of our people and to bring to his senses anyone who dares encroach upon our freedom and independence’, and that the new conditions made possible a diversion of resources away from the military sector towards light industry. This was not favourably received by either the military or those responsible for heavy industry. The issue was less whether the imperialist aggression could be prevented and more what was the level of preparedness necessary for this task. The opposition insisted that the imperialists had not relaxed their hostility to the Soviet Union or their military build-up. Bulganin stated in March 1954: ‘We would commit an irreparable error if we did not strengthen our armed forces. Very many facts indicate that the imperialist forces headed by the US are openly conducting a policy of the preparation of a new war against us’. In January 1955, as the campaign against Malenkov reached a new pitch, there was an increase in war scares and calls to strengthen heavy industry.
Aside from the destructive impact of atomic and hydrogen bombs, there is another threat for mankind involved in atomic war—poisoning the atmosphere and the surface of the globe with radioactive substances, originating from nuclear explosions…the wind spreads them all over the Earth’s atmosphere. Later these radioactive substances fall onto the surface of the Earth with rain, snow and dust, thus poisoning it….Calculations show that if, in case of war, currently existing stocks of atomic weapons are used, dosages of radioactive emissions and concentrations of radioactive substances which are biologically harmful for human life and vegetation will be created on a significant part of the Earth’s surface….The tempo of growth of atomic explosives is such that in just a few years the stockpiles of atomic explosives will be sufficient to create conditions under which the existence of life over the whole globe will be impossible. The explosion of around one hundred hydrogen bombs would lead to the same effect.8
Khrushchev publicly rejected this argument and the article was never published. Yet privately he later recalled he couldn’t sleep for days. ‘Then I became convinced that we could never use these weapons, and when I realised that I was able to sleep again’.9 On the other hand, Khrushchev had few illusions about the dangers of nuclear war.10 Months earlier he watched a film of a hydrogen bomb test and reportedly was unable to sleep for days afterwards. The psychological impact of the H-bomb on the Soviet leader was more profound than the A-bomb had been. Yet internal political struggle and the need to adhere to the party line led to a marginalization of dissenting voices and suppression of the fears of the scientists.
In the aftermath of his political victory over Malenkov, Khrushchev was more willing to openly accept the darker conclusions about the dangers of nuclear war.11 He was soon denouncing those who believed that war was ‘fatalistically inevitable’ and proclaiming the possibility of ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the two opposed camps. His expressed views on these matters probably reflected his actual beliefs, as well as having propaganda value in relation to not only domestic opponents but also the United States and the Chinese.12
In addition to immediate destruction, the employment of nuclear weapons will poison the atmosphere with radioactive fall-out and this could lead to the annihilation of almost all life, especially in countries of small territory and high population density. These all will be literally wiped off the face of the earth.
These words were chosen with care. There was no escaping the grievous consequences of nuclear war but they were worse for some than for others. Particularly vulnerable were ‘countries of small territory and high population density’, an apt description of some of America’s allies in Europe but not the Soviet Union (nor the United States). Marshal of Aviation Vershinin explained in 1957 why ‘the possibility of lightning annihilation of the Soviet Union is excluded’. The reason was that ‘Our country is not an island or a point on the globe; it has enormous territory over which our vital resources are dispersed’. In a November 1957 interview with an American reporter Khrushchev explained the virtues of Russia’s size. In a nuclear war, ‘we too, of course, will suffer great losses. But look at the vast spaces on our map and look at Germany, France and Britain’. He agreed that the US also had vast spaces but then pointed out that American industry was much more concentrated. Thus reassurance was found in the physical character of the Soviet Union. However, with the growth of US stockpiles there were limits to even this argument. It became increasingly difficult to demonstrate how the Soviet Union would survive nuclear exchanges and prevail over her enemies.
The only satisfactory way out of this quandary, other than avoiding war altogether, lay in finding a means of reducing the destructiveness of the enemy attack. Recognising the factor of surprise suggested such a way. If it was scientifically proven that the Soviet Union could thwart the imperialists’ plans for attack by a sudden blow of their own then the Soviet Union and communist ideology might yet survive a war intact. Thus the Soviet theorists moved, as did many in the United States, towards a theory of pre-emptive attack as a means of demonstrating how the Soviet Union could fight and win a thermonuclear war.
Surprise attack, employing atomic and hydrogen weapons and other modern means of conflict, now takes on new forms and is capable of leading to significantly greater results than in the past war…. Surprise attack with the massive employment of new weapons can cause the rapid collapse of a government whose capacity to resist is low as a consequence of radical faults in its social and economic structure and also as a consequence of an unfavourable geographic position.
The duty of the Soviet armed forces is not to permit an enemy surprise attack on our country and, in the event of an attempt to accomplish one, not only to repel the attack successfully but also to deal the enemy counter blows, or even pre-emptive surprise blows, of terrible destructive force. For this the Soviet army and navy possess everything necessary.13
He did recognise the importance of intelligence capabilities to provide timely warning of attack: ‘It is absolutely clear and beyond argument that Marxist-Leninist science is fully capable of foreseeing such a significant phenomenon in the life of society as the transition from a condition of peace to a condition of war’. These statements were only true if the author was thinking of counter-value rather than counter-force nuclear attacks, or of attacks involving conventional forces.
A pre-emptive attack against strategic air forces required more air power than was then available to the Soviet Union. An article published just before that of Rotmistrov spoke of nuclear weapons placed on aircraft being used to interdict airfields or to affect the course of the ground or naval battle, but not for long-range strategic missions. By 1956, with the first Soviet intercontinental bombers in service, long-range operations were considered feasible and were being openly discussed. At the 20th Party Congress in June 1956, Marshal Zhukov spoke of the increased importance of the Air Force. This then was taken up by General Krasilnikov who made it clear that a war could not be won by a single blow against the armed forces of the enemy, especially if they were dispersed in a large, well-defended territory. Nor could a strategic attack against the enemy’s ‘deep rear’ be decisive, though it would help. Victory would only come through an extended war.
The successful employment of strategic surprise in the initial phase of the war can lead to disruption of the opponent’s existing plans for the strategic deployment of his main forces and to the possibility of a rapid piecemeal destruction of the troops concentrated by him. … An especially intense struggle to pre-empt the opponent will take place in the campaign of the initial phase of the war. … In as much as air forces have the greatest readiness for action and dispose of means for dealing powerful blows, campaigns will obviously be started by their active employment. In the campaign of the initial phase both sides will first seek to deal crushing destruction to the opponent’s air forces, and his sources for the production of atomic weapons, and to seize mastery in the air.
Complementary to these attacks on the armed forces of the enemy would be strikes ‘armed at undermining the economic might of the opponent and weakening his will for resistance’.15
In this context the ICBM completed the ‘revolution in Soviet military affairs’. During the post-Stalin thaw there had been explicit discussions on the potential of missiles. They were played down with predictions of limited range, inaccuracy and inefficiency as a means of delivering high-value payloads. However, from 1956 on, encouraged by an enthusiast for missiles, Major General Pokrovsky, it was argued that ‘The future … belongs to long-range ballistic rockets’. By the middle of 1957 the Russians were reaping the benefits of the early start to their ICBM programme by being the first to test ICBMs. For the first time the Soviet Union appeared to be pulling ahead in the arms race. With many Americans also sharing the same belief, this was a moment for the Kremlin to savour.
The present period is something of a turning point. Military specialists believe that airplanes, bombers and fighters, are in their decline. Bombers have such speed and altitudes that they are vulnerable to attack by contemporary rockets.16
ICBMs were able to deliver thermonuclear weapons at great speed to anywhere on the globe and in any weather; air defences were incapable of stopping them. Their mobility allowed for concealed launching points and so they could be used for surprise attacks while being virtually invulnerable to attack. Pokrovsky noted in 1956: ‘The most effective defence against such long-range rockets is by means of their destruction in storage places, in the process of transport, and on the launching platforms where the preparation for each firing takes a rather long time’. However, these rockets would not require very complicated preliminary equipping and could be ‘deployed in the most unexpected places’. Launching platforms could be ‘constructed relatively quickly, quite dispersed, and well concealed’. They would be harder to detect than air-fields. ‘Therefore it will be very difficult for the enemy to prevent the launching of a rocket’.17 In March 1958, reflecting the general euphoria, Talensky even went so far as to suggest that ICBMs were decisive—a radical departure from the consistent official line that no single weapon or mode of warfare could itself decide the outcome of wars.
The shift in Soviet strategy had been dramatic. In a five-year period it had moved from assigning only minimal importance to the factors of surprise and the new technologies of nuclear weapons and long-range delivery vehicles to a strategy dominated by the concept of surprise and Soviet prowess in ICBMs. In his January 1960 speech to the Supreme Soviet, Khrushchev declared that although a war with capitalism was no longer inevitable, if war did occur, it would begin with missile strikes aimed at strategic targets in the interior of the combatant countries. For Khrushchev, the outcome of such a war would be decided in a matter of hours.18
This view of the future, however, was not reflected in the present reality of Soviet capabilities. Three problems would confound the Soviets in practice for at least another decade. The first was that Soviet missiles through the 1960s were highly vulnerable. Not only were warheads kept separate from the missiles, requiring two-to-three hours to couple them, but the liquid-fuelled missiles themselves needed five-to-six hours to be prepared for launch. This long lead-time was linked to the second problem of inability to keep the locations of Soviet missile sites secret due to advances in overhead reconnaissance. The third problem was the limited number of Soviet missiles able to strike targets in the United States, as well as their limited accuracy. Therefore they could only be aimed at American cities. These technological realities necessitated a pre-emptive posture otherwise the Soviet Union risked not being able to retaliate at all, yet simultaneously, pre-emption was unlikely to spare the USSR from a massive retaliation.19
Meantime, the Soviets developed an interest in the second phase of operations in a nuclear war. Though Khrushchev may have intended to emphasize the decisive opening ‘intercontinental’ phase to justify large-scale cuts of Soviet conventional forces, Soviet generals had their own ideas about military operations in the European theatre. For them, ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons would be used to achieve a breakthrough that would be exploited by large conventional forces, though some dissenting military voices argued the level of conventional forces needed to secure territory that had already suffered from nuclear devastation would not have to be quite so large. These debates within the Soviet military would become particularly heated in the early 1960s.20
Khrushchev was less interested in the potential war-fighting applications of nuclear weapons and more cognizant of the international implications of making nuclear threats and boasting about Soviet nuclear capabilities. Thus he spoke to American allies such as Turkey about how in case of war ‘By the time these friends come to their rescue, Turkey will be no more’. He showed the Yugoslav leader Josef Tito films of nuclear explosions and missile tests. He saw an opportunity to explore what might be achieved politically during the 1956 Suez crisis when Britain and France colluded with Israel in an invasion of Egypt following the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Late in the crisis, Soviet officials warned Britain and France about the prospect of this local conflict resulting in an attack from ‘a more powerful state which possesses all means of modern destructive weapons’. When a ceasefire followed shortly thereafter, Khrushchev linked this directly to his nuclear threats, and subsequently convinced himself that nuclear threats had an influential political effect in international affairs. This was not, however, the reason why the British and French had backed down over Suez, although the Soviet threat had been duly noted. As Craig and Radchenko note, this pattern of behaviour through the crises of the late 1950s saw Khrushchev using ‘nuclear bluster in the hopes of brandishing Soviet power on the cheap, secure in the conviction that it would never escalate to an actual war’.21
Boasting about the strength of the nuclear arsenal might provide political benefits, but only so long as the nuclear bluff could be credibly maintained. This depended upon absolute secrecy about the relatively limited strength of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. In 1955, at his first meeting with Khrushchev, Eisenhower had proposed what he called ‘Open Skies’. The idea was that both sides would provide blueprints of their military installations and allow each other to station aircraft sufficiently close by to fly over these installations to inspect them. This was a way to prevent a surprise attack. Khrushchev rejected the idea as a ‘very transparent espionage device’.22 Yet at that time the Americans were close to testing the long-range high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and would soon be able to conduct their own overflights. Several years later, the U-2 would be followed by reconnaissance satellites. The high degree of secrecy upon which the USSR had depended and enjoyed would no longer be possible.23
We now have a broad range of rockets and in such quantity that can virtually shatter the world. One may ask—shall we have this terrible armament—atomic, rocket armament, and shall we have such a big army, which we have [today]? This does not make sense. Our assumption is that we do not seek war and we do not prepare for offensive [war], but we prepare defence. If one accepts this assumption, as we do, our army should be capable of defending the country, of repelling enemies that might try to attack our Motherland or our allies, when we have these powerful armaments, such as rockets. But that is what they are for. What country or group of countries in Europe would dare to attack us, when we can virtually erase these countries from the face of the Earth by our atomic and hydrogen weapons and by launching our rockets to every point of the globe?…. To maintain this huge army would mean to reduce our economic potential.24
Khrushchev attempted to gain as much political benefit as possible from his apparent lead over the Americans by capitalizing on their anxieties. In a classic case of counting chickens before hatching, he regularly boasted publicly of his country’s success in missile technology—including a rather infamous reference to turning out missiles ‘like sausages on an assembly line’.25 This strategy became unstuck when it became evident in 1961 that the missile gap was in America’s favour and not the other way round.26 Because of the limits to its capabilities, it is doubtful if Soviet war-plans placed quite so much emphasis on ICBMs as did Khrushchev in his rhetoric. The single-minded devotion to this particular weapon was one of the criticisms levelled at him when he was removed from office in 1964.
Though it is natural to observe the similarities in the calls for pre-emptive war capabilities in each of the super-powers, there were still important differences between the two. The Soviet assumption was that Europe would be the prize in a future war and that it would be fought over with land forces. There was an obvious incentive not to destroy this prize by thermonuclear bombardment if it could possibly be avoided. Victory would come through the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces. There was unceasing rejection of a strategy that relied solely on the bombing of the enemy’s economic and population centres. Furthermore Soviet considerations of possible sources of surprise attacks did not stop with a nuclear strike. The Americans were influenced by their experience of Pearl Harbor; the Soviets by their experience of land invasions. When Eastern and Western experts met in 1958 to consider ways of reducing the dangers of surprise attacks the Americans were wholly preoccupied with ‘nuclear Pearl Harbors’ while the Soviet delegation was concerned with a wider range of eventualities, including old-fashioned invasions over land.27 Their interest in the military role of nuclear weapons was as much with their impact on land warfare as on the ‘stability of the rear’. The Soviet Generals insisted that though they would have to adjust tactics to conditions of atomic bombardment they could still prevail. If it came to nuclear war the Russians did consider, as an article of faith, that their society was better suited to cope than capitalist societies. They also took practical steps to improve their civil defences, though much of this took the form of reassurances to the population that atomic war could be survived if sensible precautions were taken.
There was, however, an important cultural point that needs to be borne in mind when considering the pronouncements of Soviet and American commentators when assessing the strengths and weaknesses of themselves and each other. There was always an element of reassurance in Soviet pronouncements on the state of the strategic balance, a function perhaps of the inferior position from which the Soviet Union began the nuclear age and the consequent desire to avoid defeatism (and the generally optimistic tone about all things encouraged by the prevailing ideology). The Americans, because of a sense of declining superiority, erred in the opposite direction, stressing the gains being made by the Soviet Union. Often a motive could be found in the desire to encourage a more determined national effort in the arms race. It was quite possible for the Americans to offer gloomy assessments of a decisive tilt in the balance towards the Soviet Union, have it confirmed by Soviet leaders, and yet still be wrong. This is precisely what happened in the late 1950s.
The Soviet Union opted for a policy of pre-emptive war as a way out of the problems posed by parallel nuclear stockpiles of vast destructive power. Given that war could not be ruled out, the Soviet military were as anxious as their Western counterparts to find means of prevailing and of limiting the damage to their own side. There is no evidence that they believed that their improving capabilities for waging nuclear war gave them the option of starting a war, or of gaining a sudden victory with only minimal harm to themselves. Whether or not even a pre-emptive strategy was viable was a question that had to be faced in both East and West.