The missile crisis left Kennedy’s reputation enhanced and strengthened his political position. It had the opposite effect on Khrushchev. He was the one who had taken the initiative and then backed down. In the late 1950s he had taken advantage of the belief that the Soviet Union was moving ahead in the arms race. His posturing was now shown up as being based on exaggerated claims which had led to strategic inferiority. By this time he had also made many enemies in the Soviet system, not least among the military establishment, who felt that insufficient regard was being paid to the employment of types of forces other than long-range missiles.
An anecdote from Khrushchev’s memoirs illustrates his fascination with rocketry and his personal involvement in the relevant decision-making in contrast with the management of strategic innovation in the US. Khrushchev recalled that one of Russia’s first rockets was ‘fired from a launching pad which looked like a huge tabletop and could easily be detected by reconnaissance planes or satellites in orbit around the earth’. Khrushchev claimed that he drew on his experience as a coal miner and as a supervisor during the building of the Moscow Metro to suggest that the missiles could be put into ‘sunken covered shafts’. After being told by his engineers that this ‘wouldn’t work’ he let the matter drop. Some years later his son, Sergei, who was involved in the missile programme, informed Khrushchev that ‘he’d read in some American journal that the US had begun to replace launching pads with silos’. He then felt able to give some orders. A programme to dig sunken silos was initiated and completed after his ‘retirement’ in 1964.1
Khrushchev’s belief in the quality of his own insight into these matters inevitably led him into conflict with the military. In 1959 he remarked that he did ‘not trust appraisals of generals on questions of strategic importance’. The lack of respect was mutual. Once Khrushchev had been displaced in October 1964 by a leadership the generals found more congenial, they made clear their view that strategic matters demanded a competence and understanding only possessed by the professional military. The indictment was delivered by General Zakharov in February 1965: ‘With the emergence of rocket-nuclear arms, cybernetics, electronics and computers, any subjective approach to military problems, hare-brained plans, and superficiality can cause irreparable damage.’2
Our state has a powerful rocket technology. Given the present development of military technology, military aviation and the navy have lost their former importance. This type of armament is not being reduced but replaced. Military aviation is now being almost entirely replaced by missiles. We have now sharply reduced and probably will further reduce and even halt production of bombers and other obsolete equipment. In the navy, the submarine fleet is assuming greater importance and surface ships can no longer play the role they played in the past.
He justified a cut in manpower by reference to the increase in firepower made possible by nuclear weapons. ‘Firepower’, Khrushchev explained, was ‘the main thing after all. In essence the reason why states maintain armies is precisely to have power that can withstand a possible enemy and either restrain him from attacking or repulse him if he tries to attack.’4
A rocket-carrying aircraft can be considered the first stage of a multi-stage system which has important advantages over multistage missiles. It does not require permanent launch sites or complex and expensive launch equipment. The first stage, the piloted aircraft, is used repeatedly. When necessary, the aircraft can be redirected after a command decision. If the target is relocated, the aircraft crew can make a decision in order to successfully execute the combat mission. Only rocket-carrying aircraft possess these qualities.5
An internal debate was conducted in the top secret journal Military Thought. Here leading Soviet generals recognised the importance of missiles for a conflict in Europe and the need for new doctrinal concepts, but they disagreed about the implications for the conventional forces, specifically whether or not these forces were now mostly irrelevant. A revisionist, albeit minority, argument was that in a war against NATO, Soviet nuclear use in Europe by the Strategic Rocket Forces would be widespread and therefore no significant conventional battle would occur. At best, Soviet units would occupy the rubble. The policy implication of this was that the size of the Soviet conventional military could be significantly scaled down.6 Khrushchev was naturally supportive of this position given his strong interest in reducing military expenditure. By contrast, the more orthodox and majority view was that nuclear use in Europe should only occur at the behest of local army commanders, if necessary, as part of a large-scale conventional attack. At this time, the mainstream Soviet conception of a military advance into Western Europe, re-affirmed in war games, was that Soviet forces would advance up to 100 km per day despite the expected nuclear devastation. This would result in the destruction of NATO forces and the occupation of Western Europe in two weeks or less—a scenario that constituted a ‘winnable’ nuclear war from the Soviet perspective.7 It was also argued that in the event of widespread nuclear use there would still be enough organized resistance, and attrition rates on the Soviet side would be so high as to require a large reserve of conventional manpower. In this view, the Soviets still needed to maintain large forward-deployed conventional ground and air forces.8 Such was the disproportionate weight in favour of this traditionalist view that the revisionist approaches were marginalized.9
In 1962 the military worked out a shared position which was presented in a volume edited by Marshal Sokolovsky, entitled Military Strategy. This major work defined the new consensus that had emerged through the post-Stalin debate on nuclear strategy and the more recent arguments with Khrushchev.10 The work avoided controversy and read like a compromise document. It offered no clear priorities for the design of Soviet forces while providing support for claims for every type of force. Nor was there even an unambiguous view on the likely character of a future war. Some passages suggest that it would be long; others that it would be short. At times the hypothesis of the inevitability of the expansion of limited war into a global nuclear war was given vigorous support; elsewhere there were indications that some limits might hold. Most difficult of all was the uneasy relationship between the ‘decisive’ first phase involving nuclear missiles, and the final phase where the ultimate outcome depended on the strength of the surviving conventional forces. This particular problem was exacerbated by movements in US forces and doctrine (to which Sokolovsky and his team paid great attention).
It was not only the suspicion of the military that caused Khrushchev’s strategy to be qualified, but also the continuing teething troubles of the Soviet missile programme which created an awkward lacuna in Soviet capabilities at the very time when a tangible superiority over the US had been expected. More important, this was a time of significant new directions in American policy. Many of Khrushchev’s formulations were reminiscent of those that had been popular in the US during the Eisenhower Administration. They had little in common with those brought to the fore by the Kennedy Administration.
Apart from a shared belief in the obsolescence of long-range bombers, the Americans and Russians appeared in 1961 to be diverging in their strategies. While Khrushchev contented himself with a minimum deterrent, Kennedy worried about the problems of securing a second-strike capability. While Khrushchev spoke of the obsolescence of conventional armaments, Kennedy argued for extending conventional options. In addition, as once Khrushchev had gloated over his imminent missile superiority, the US Administration could now provide facts and figures on American superiority. This was diplomatically irritating and militarily alarming, for the combination of American missile superiority, the ability using satellites to find—and so target—Soviet missile sites with accuracy, and a new doctrine which emphasized counter-force attacks aroused Soviet fears of an American first strike.
I hold that today the socialist camp is stronger than these countries [NATO], but let us presume that the forces are equal. We are ready to agree to this so as not to take part in stirring up a war psychosis. But since the forces are equal the American leaders should come to correct conclusions and pursue a reasonable policy.11
In the middle of 1961, during the Berlin crisis, the cuts in conventional forces were halted. As long-range bombers remained the largest single component of a small Soviet retaliatory force, the theme of their obsolescence had to be played down. To provide for the future, major new research and development programmes were initiated. It was hoped that by building an anti-ballistic missile system comparable to the air defence system much of the sting could eventually be taken out of any American attack. Development of space weapons was also encouraged, this still being considered an area where the USSR enjoyed a technological lead over the US.
Khrushchev believes absolutely that when it comes to a showdown, Britain, France and Italy would refuse to join the United States in a war over Berlin for fear of their absolute destruction. Quite blandly he asserts that these countries are, figuratively speaking, hostages to the USSR and a guarantee against war.12
During the Berlin crisis pointed references were made to the vulnerability of US bases in Europe to nuclear attack and the disaster this could mean for the host countries.
A second feature of Khrushchev’s response was to emphasize the ferocity of the explosion of each nuclear warhead rather than the number of individual explosions that could be achieved. The ‘terror quotient’ was exaggerated with talks of bombs of immense megatonnage, even up to 100 million tons of TNT. A test series began in September 1961 that included, among other high-yield tests, the notorious ‘Tsar Bomba’ of 56 megatons. This was all despite the fact that the damage achieved by such weapons would not be substantially greater than that achieved with weapons of 5–10 megatons, and that there were no existing means of delivering such payloads.
The Americans were reminded that any idea of fighting a nuclear war using smaller nuclear weapons against discrete military targets as part of a controlled process of escalation had to be put aside in the face of the huge weapons likely to be employed by the Soviet Union. The prospect offered was of an all-out conflict opening with massive nuclear exchanges in which few cities would escape unscathed. The notion of limitations and agreed conventions in this sort of total war was mocked and undermined by assertions of the unavoidable escalation of any war between the super-powers. In Soviet plans, nuclear and conventional forces and civilian and military targets appeared intermingled.
The first-strike menace implied by the American build-up in strategic forces, and Gilpatric’s speech reporting the fact, created a major problem when the total Soviet forces were so scarce. In public, this menace was downplayed. At the Party Congress in October 1961 Marshal Malinovsky chided the Americans for underestimating the damage the USSR could inflict upon them, asserting that calculations had been made with ‘only’ a 5 megaton warhead. He continued: ‘we have nuclear charges equivalent to several tens of thousands and up to 100 million tons of TNT, and our ballistic rockets have proved to be so splendid no one can doubt their ability to lift and deliver such charges to any point on earth’.13 In the event the largest yield ever employed on a Soviet ICBM warhead was 25 megatons.
The matter was taken more seriously by Soviet strategists. The first edition of Sokolovsky’s Military Strategy wrote of how ‘primary attention’ was directed ‘to the study of how a future war may break out’, which included ‘detailed study’ of, among other things, ‘methods of delivering the first blow’. Elsewhere it stated that ‘the main task of Soviet military strategy is working out means for reliably repelling a surprise nuclear attack by an aggressor’. The initial phase was described as ‘fierce and destructive’. It would ‘pre-determine the development and outcome of the entire war’. The targets attacked would be the most important which, it was made clear from another part of the book, were ‘strategic nuclear weapons’ located well away from theatres of military operations. ‘Unless these weapons are destroyed or neutralized, it is impossible to protect the country’s vital centres from destruction, and one cannot count on successfully achieving the aim of the war even if the [enemy] troop formation deployed in the military theatres are destroyed.’14
The logic of this line of argument led to some sort of pre-emptive attack policy. It was not one explicitly reached in this book, despite the hints. Nevertheless, there is evidence that this logic was at least partly followed. The policy adopted in principle was that of ‘launch-on-warning’. With timely warning of an incoming attack the retaliatory force could be launched in time to avoid its own destruction. In November 1967, Marshal Krylov, Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces, wrote: ‘an aggressor is no longer able suddenly to destroy the missiles before their launch on the territory of the country against which the aggression is committed. They will have time during the flight of the missiles of the aggressor to leave their launchers and inflict a retaliatory strike against the enemy.’15 At the time, however, this was no more than an aspiration. It took until the 1970s for the delays caused by the significant weaknesses of Soviet early warning systems, and the lengthy period required to launch its missiles, for ‘launch-on-warning’ to become a practical option. Equally, if launch-on-warning was at all feasible for Soviet forces then that would also be an additional source of caution when contemplating a first strike against US forces. They might be similarly prepared.
The third rapid solution attempted by Khrushchev, which we considered earlier, was one that back-fired dramatically. This was to place medium- and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba. Unfortunately for Khrushchev instead of compensating for the comparative weakness of the Soviet Union the outcome of this crisis confirmed it in a public and humiliating fashion.
Sobered by this experience, and now having to cope with increasing challenges from the Chinese communists, Khrushchev embarked on a policy of detente, seeking to hold down American military strength through arms control, obviating the need for large-scale procurement programmes in the USSR. After all that the military had been through with Khrushchev—the boasting and the bluster combined with a deteriorating military position and the humiliating climb-down over Cuba—they became notably more hostile to his prescriptions for either force levels or the conduct of relations with the United States. In military newspapers and periodicals, the prospects for peaceful coexistence with the United States (and all that would entail by way of reduced military expenditure) were treated with scepticism.
The main issue was over the extent of the American threat. To pave the way for a policy of peaceful coexistence, Khrushchev had begun in the 1950s to identify ‘sober’, ‘realistic’, and ‘reasonable’ factions in US ruling circles, with whom deals could be done, providing the other ‘belligerent’ and ‘aggressive’ faction was contained.16 This was similar to American views of the Soviet Union which divided the ruling group into ‘modernist’ or ‘orthodox’ factions, the former being the most realistic and moderate.17 For Khrushchev, the American president was less important for determining US policy than the ‘forces behind the president’. He believed that these forces, despite their ‘imperialist motives’, were still rational, and would prefer negotiations and compromise if confronted by Soviet strength.18 This sort of interpretation was resisted by the military, who spoke more of a ‘predatory nature’ inherent in imperialism.19 This military view was internalized to the extent that Soviet and Warsaw Pact assessments of NATO consistently presupposed that the Alliance was offensively rather than defensively orientated and that in any future conflict NATO would be the aggressor.20
The impact of Cuba was evident in subsequent Soviet attitudes towards nuclear sharing and extended deterrence although the seeds of doubt had already been planted as a result of its earlier experience with China. Having achieved what he perceived as a successful example of Soviet nuclear bluffing during the Suez Crisis, Khrushchev expressed interest in using Soviet nuclear weapons to provide an umbrella for anti-colonialist movements. The Soviets soon recognized, however, that they could easily lose control in a crisis and become embroiled in a conflict not of their choosing due to a hot-headed ally acting confidently on the assumption that the USSR’s nuclear umbrella would protect them. For instance, during the October 1962 crisis, Castro had wanted nuclear weapons to be used if the US invaded—something that Khrushchev definitely wished to avoid. Similarly, any notion that had previously been entertained of potentially providing the Warsaw Pact armies with nuclear weapons based on a dual-key arrangement ‘essentially vanished’ as a result of the crisis.21 This of course presumed that the Warsaw Pact countries would still want access to Soviet nuclear weapons. Romania, which felt itself unnecessarily at risk during the Cuban crisis, as it had not been consulted by Moscow, reached out to Washington a year later. Dean Rusk was informed by his Romanian counterpart, Corneliu Manescu, that Bucharest had no part in the Soviet action and in a future similar situation would remain neutral. He requested that the US took account of this in their targeting policy.22
Among the other consequences for Soviet policy in the aftermath of the Cuba crisis was abandoning any notion of minimum deterrence and accelerating the development of advanced Soviet intercontinental missile capabilities. This policy of achieving ‘parity’ was effectively decided at a February 1963 meeting of the Defence Council. Nevertheless, Khrushchev continued to reiterate in vain his own belief that a minimum deterrent—consisting of several hundred intercontinental megaton weapons aimed at cities—that guaranteed retaliation, would be sufficient to deter the Americans from aggression, and emphasized that nuclear weapons should only be contemplated as a political tool rather than as an instrument of war. This view remained anathema to the military leadership.23 In October 1964, two years after the crisis, he was removed from power. The group that replaced him were not prepared to accept a second-best deterrent.