The dogged refusal of the Russians to endorse any of McNamara’s prescriptions for intra-war deterrence or a stable arms race, undermined both confidence in McNamara’s prognoses for the future and the quality of his original diagnoses. The potential convergence of Soviet and American destinies was never as great as assumed by McNamara, but nor was the actual divergence as fundamental or as damaging as his detractors suggested. In his prime, McNamara’s faith in conclusions reached by a process of rigorous analysis, pushing to one side the deadweight of tradition, was contagious. It was not difficult to presume that he and his staff represented the furthest point on some strategic learning curve, to which internal opponents, allies and potential enemies were to be brought by a process of patient education in the realities of the age.
any Kennedy rearmament would be designed to improve the stability of the deterrent, and the Soviet Union should recognize this as in the interests of peace; but Kuznetsov, innocent of the higher calculus of deterrence as recently developed in the United States brusquely dismissed this explanation.1
In 1970 Roman Kolkowicz wrote, with a number of his colleagues, of how ‘Soviet strategic doctrine and capabilities appear to have lagged behind those of the United States by about five years’. His argument was that ‘technology seems to have a levelling effect which subsumes political, ideological, and social differences in various political systems’, and also that Western doctrine could have an ‘educative’ effect on Soviet leaders, persuading them to replace their own ideas and programmes by alternatives derived from ‘bourgeois’ societies.2 McNamara himself explained how Soviet approaches were distinct from his own by reference to the distracting effects of tradition. Thus he found the Kremlin’s continued enormous expenditure on ‘porous’ defensive systems virtually incomprehensible. It was ‘fanaticism’, best explained, he supposed, by ‘their strong emotional reaction to the need to defend Mother Russia’.3
Soviet writings on nuclear strategy often diverged markedly in their formulations and conclusions from the American literature. However, three points could be noted, at least in the first half of the 1960s, to encourage the view that the American learning curve would be followed. First, Soviet doctrine had changed in the 1950s in response to the limitations and opportunities provided by thermonuclear weapons and missiles, or the ‘Military-Technical Revolution’, as it was known in the USSR. Presumably, therefore, it could change again. Second, Soviet military literature indicated that notice was taken of American doctrine as well as capabilities. The American strategic teachers knew that their Soviet pupils were paying attention, even if they could not count on their receptivity. Third, while it was true that a careful reading of Soviet military writings left a clear impression of an expectation of the ultimate triumph of socialism, even through a victory in nuclear war, this was so far removed from actual capabilities that it was difficult to believe the Russians themselves took it seriously. In fact, despite the proud bellicosity and ideological certainty of official pronouncements, attitudes and behaviour displayed in the context of actual international affairs were exceedingly cautious.
As Soviet doctrine developed without the benefit of independent advice from the sort of civilian specialists that flourished at RAND, it was possible to guess the reason for this lack of congruence between intentions and capabilities: the Soviet generals were anxious to secure their budgets and assert their undiminished importance to the survival of the socialist state. In the early 1960s Khrushchev was obviously having trouble with his generals (as, for different reasons, was McNamara). In these circumstances it became tempting to dismiss official doctrine as largely obsolete, attempting to square a circle out of obeisance to the canons of Marxism-Leninism, and in support of requests for a higher military budget.
The growth of Soviet military capabilities during the late 1960s and 1970s encouraged Western specialists to look once again, with a less critical eye, at Soviet doctrine. It could be seen as a set of statements providing notice of a clear intention to gain superiority so as to wage and win a nuclear war whenever desired.4 As the indictment against McNamara was being drawn up by conservatives in the 1970s, the most serious item on the charge sheet was that of a failure to appreciate the distinctiveness of the Soviet approach to strategic issues. This approach, it was argued, contrasted with that of McNamara by stressing the possibility of victory in a nuclear war. The Russians did not deviate from the traditional view that the role of strategy was to devise means of winning future wars, and that the role of military planners was to prepare the necessary forces. Not only did McNamara fail to convince his Soviet counterparts of the error of their ways but, by emphasizing the possibility of a coincidence of interests between the superpowers in controlling the arms race and avoiding nuclear war, he also neglected the underlying conflict of interests.5
No meaningful victory is even conceivable in a third unlimited world war, for no nation can possibly win a full-scale thermo-nuclear exchange. The two world powers that have now achieved a mutual assured-destruction capability fully realize that.6
When Khrushchev fell in October 1964, the military took the opportunity to reassert their position. Unlike Khrushchev who was often at odds with the Soviet ‘military-industrial complex’, and wished to minimize defence expenditure, his successor Leonid Brezhnev was considerably more accommodating. Reversing the sense of nuclear inferiority that resulted from the humiliation of the Cuban Missile Crisis would become the overriding objective of Soviet policy. Only by achieving strategic parity would the USSR be recognized as a ‘true superpower’ and expand its influence on the global stage.7
During the second half of the 1960s Soviet military strength grew extremely fast and by the end of the decade had caught up, at least in raw numbers, with the Americans. This improvement in capabilities, which continued in the 1970s, made a number of Western observers nervous that the possibility of victory in a nuclear war was being taken more seriously, and that ‘pre-emption’ was becoming a serious option for Soviet planners. The frequent discussion of the importance of the factor of surprise and the stress on the need to take the tactical offensive (which pervaded all Soviet military writing) gave the references, regular since the 1960s, of the possibility of ‘frustrating’, ‘disrupting’, and ‘forestalling’ an enemy strike, a more sinister connotation.8 Former CIA analyst Fritz Ermarth identified as two ‘very unpleasant features’ of Soviet doctrine: ‘a strong tendency to pre-empt and a determination to suppress the enemy’s command and control systems at all costs’.9
This line of reasoning pointed to a general Soviet predilection for ‘war-fighting’ as opposed to deterrent capabilities. Semantic confusion could set in here, for the two are not necessarily exclusive: the point was often made in the West that the most credible form of deterrent would be a capability to fight and even win a war if necessary. This would appear to have become the Soviet view; fortified by nagging doubts over whether deterrence would hold indefinitely.10
Here the Soviet divergence from the views expressed by McNamara was significant. The idea of relying solely on ‘assured destruction’ did not provide a satisfactory answer to the question of what to do if deterrence failed. Moreover, talking of mutual deterrence suggested that the USSR needed to be deterred, a proposition it could not accept. Nor could Moscow accept the idea that long-term peace could be brought about by the fear of nuclear weapons, or that some scientific breakthrough in the future would not upset the balance of terror.11
Even in the event that one of the sides were the first to be subjected to attack, it would undoubtedly retain the ability to inflict a retaliatory strike of crushing power. Thus evidently we all agree that war between our two countries would be disastrous for both sides. And it would be tantamount to suicide for the ones who decided to start such a war.12
The second qualification concerned capabilities. The essentials of Soviet doctrine remained unchanged despite variations in its ability to fulfil many of the military tasks the doctrine said ought to be fulfilled. One problem of talking about a ‘war-fighting capability’ was that it set no self-evident limits, save the availability of resources and the requisite technology, on the procurement of new weapons. While Soviet doctrine deserved to be taken more seriously with the growth of capabilities, there remained important gaps. For example, if the civil defence forces of the Soviet Union were successful in achieving its objectives ‘to rapidly liquidate the consequences of enemy nuclear strikes, promptly render extensive and diverse aid to casualties, and secure the conditions for the more normal functioning of the facilities of the national economy’13 then there would be serious consequences for mutual deterrence. The USSR made a greater effort in this area than the US, mainly to ensure a functioning government and preserve key industrial facilities. It never, however, got close to rendering nuclear war more survivable.14
Another example where the desiderata implied by the strategy were not matched by capability, also in the defensive area, was ABMs, in which there was a major Soviet investment through the 1960s. Under Brezhnev, Soviet ABM research was being much more actively pursued than it had during the Khrushchev period. The idea that missile defence could threaten stability was not quickly accepted by the Soviet leadership. This was particularly true of the military where the link between limiting missile defence and limiting offensive weapons was not appreciated. In 1967, a year when McNamara was making his most strenuous efforts to convince his Soviet opposite numbers of the unwisdom of ABM deployment, there was a vigorous debate in the USSR on the matter, not so much on the arms race effects of deployment, but on whether it would actually be possible to block a serious missile attack. That year saw the first reports in professional journals of the measures that might be used to defeat missile defences. These included not only decoys and chaff to confuse the radars but also multiple independently-targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) that meant that a single ICBM could send a number of warheads to attack individual targets. The US Polaris was tested with three warheads, pointing to the advantages the offence still enjoyed in nuclear exchanges. It was also pointed out by Soviet scientists that US counter-measures such as decoys and chaff would render such a system anachronistic. Regardless of whether the logic of deterrence was the result of a ‘strategic re-calculation’ based on the merits of American arguments or forced upon the Soviet leadership due to recognition of the ability of American counter-measures to overcome Soviet missile defences, there was a degree of public convergence on the idea that mutual deterrence underpinned strategic stability.15 The ABM deployment programme around Moscow faltered then stopped.16 When the two powers agreed in 1972 to limit ABMs in SALT I, Marshal Grechko, the Minister of Defence, wrote about how this Treaty prevented ‘the emergence of a chain reaction of competition between offensive and defensive arms’.17
Soviet planners, like American planners, had to recognise that offensive arms always seemed to have the edge on defensive arms and that, while war was a contingency for which preparations could be made, initiating one would rarely make much sense as a political option. The main difference was that in the USSR, unlike the US, there were not only few institutional checks on the military, as they accumulated weapons in preparation for war, but also a strong predisposition to encourage the accumulation of weapons out of the ideological need to demonstrate that the outcome of any war would be more favourable to socialism than imperialism. Soviet views on nuclear war were scarcely uniform, however, and heated debates over doctrine would periodically occur. These debates were often couched in competing interpretations of Clausewitz.18
Within the Soviet system there was a notable chasm between Marxist-Leninist theory as a guide to thinking about nuclear war and actual practice. According to the theory, victory in a nuclear war was possible. For ideological reasons, this remained the official line. In practice, Soviet military leaders were unable to devise a definition of what such a victory would look like, focusing instead on the amount of destruction that could be inflicted on the enemy. At best, there was the idea that some pockets of the USSR might survive, but this was not something Soviet officials were keen to dwell upon.
The Soviets did not have a precise equivalent of RAND but civilian and military analysts working for the in-house ‘think tanks’ in the General Staff, Strategic Rocket Forces, Ministry of General Machine Building and the missile design bureaus (e.g. the Voroshilov Military Academy, TSNII-MASH, NII-4, etc.) studied the problems of nuclear strategy using quantitative methods and computer modelling.19 As with RAND the ‘dissenting’ views of these analysts often ran counter to the preferences of the military, and in the Soviet case, of the Communist Party as well. These views did not have an immediate impact in changing Soviet practice but played some part in planting seeds of doubt in the minds of the leadership.20
One of the topics these analysts examined was the effect of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield. Whereas the Soviet military through the 1960s had anticipated a high-rate of advance into Western Europe with the use of nuclear weapons, studies conducted by the Soviet General Staff on this issue in the mid-1960s to early-1970s demonstrated that these assumptions were false.21 Another study, conducted around the same period, dealt with the climatic and contamination effects both of a large-scale nuclear conflict as well as a nuclear conflict limited to Europe in which only a fraction of the nuclear weapons available were employed. These studies highlighted the operational implications as well as the more general ecological threat that the use of nuclear weapons posed. Brezhnev and Kosygin were reportedly ‘visibly terrified’ after being informed in 1972 of the results of a series of General Staff exercises and models discussing the effects of a US nuclear strike on the USSR.22 For political and bureaucratic reasons, these critical studies were suppressed. Nevertheless, there was a growing recognition within the Soviet military leadership that nuclear weapons had little military utility and were essentially political tools.23
In 1965, retired General Nikolai Talensky, a regular participant in the Pugwash conferences and a leading supporter of Khrushchev’s views on the unacceptability of nuclear war, wrote an article warning of the ‘dangerous illusion that the idea that thermonuclear war can still serve as an instrument of politics, that it is possible to achieve political aims by using nuclear weapons and still survive, that it is possible to find acceptable forms of nuclear war’. A number of conservative military figures, who would soon acquire the label ‘Red Hawks’, attacked this notion, not so much because of its theoretical weakness but because of the bad effects on morale.24 Lieutenant-Colonel Rybkin, who referred to Talensky disparagingly as a ‘Pugwash General’, wrote that: ‘Any a priori rejection of the possibility of victory is harmful because it leads to moral disarmament, to a disbelief in victory and to fatalism and passivity. It is necessary to wage a struggle against such views and attitudes.’ In addition, there was the ever-present danger of the imperialists unleashing a war.25 Implicit in the criticism from the Red Hawks was their disapproval of Khrushchev’s ideas about a minimal or deterrence-only nuclear posture, and their preference for the development of nuclear war fighting capabilities.
As in the United States, those most convinced by the possibility of war fighting as a serious strategic option assumed that conviction was shared by their counterparts on the other side. Soviet studies of silo vulnerability that analyzed satellite photos of American missile sites highlighted the lack of overhead cover and close proximity of the silos to one another, and concluded from this that US land-based missiles were intended for a first-strike as they would not be able to ‘ride out’ an attack. As a result, and due to the limitations on the Soviet ability to quickly launch their own missiles—thereby limiting the feasibility of a ‘launch under attack’ doctrine—the Soviets developed what became known as a ‘retaliatory-meeting strike’, in which Soviet and American missiles would pass each other in mid-flight. As the Soviets expected in this scenario that the US would have launched all of its ICBMs already, Soviet missiles were targeted not on US silos, but on other political, military and economic targets instead.26
Launch-on-warning may have been the preferred alternative strategy to pre-emption, as opposed to launch-under-attack or retaliation, but at this time it was simply not feasible. Due to the long duration of preparing missiles to launch, compounded by the separate storage depots for missiles and warheads—it would take hours before a nuclear use decision would actually result in the launching of missiles. Support for launch-on-warning was also undermined by the Soviet reluctance to use nuclear weapons first as well as the weaknesses of the Soviet early warning system.
It would only be in the mid-1970s when launch-on-warning emerged as a viable alternative with the deployment of an effective early warning system based on over-the-horizon radars and space-based systems. Along with improvements in Soviet command and control as well as survivability, these developments reduced the time needed to launch missiles, and so spurred changes in Soviet thinking and doctrine away from pre-emption towards launch-under-attack.27 The doctrinal issue of preparing for pre-emption or retaliation came to a head in July 1969 when Brezhnev met with senior military officials and missile designers to discuss production of the next generation of ICBMs. When it came to choosing between several options, Mstislav Keldysh, head of the USSR Academy of Sciences, argued that the choice between different missiles revolved around this doctrinal issue. Brezhnev chose to support simultaneously several different designs to satisfy the needs of the defence industry, but in practice the doctrinal question had been essentially resolved in favour of developing a second-strike capability.28 It was at this meeting that Brezhnev also came down in favour of improving the survivability of the missiles by putting them in hardened silos.
For several years prior to this meeting there had been debates among the military and industrialists about the survivability trade-offs between harder silos or more missiles. There was also the issue of military doctrine, and the general reluctance to accept the possibility of launch-under-attack. Grechko reportedly said that ‘We will not repeat the mistakes of 1941 and will not sit and wait until we are hit over the head’. The fear of a 1941-style surprise attack was discursively linked with a nuclear strategy based upon retaliation. For the Soviet military leadership, still composed of veterans from World War II, a retaliation posture was viewed as ceding initiative to the enemy, which led them back to the German surprise attack in 1941.29 At another high-level meeting of military and industrial leaders in June 1968, the issue of hardened silos was debated again. The military preferred preventive and retaliatory-meeting strikes as the best means of avoiding a surprise attack, and therefore rejected hardened silos in favour of superiority in numbers. For the same reason, they were also opposed to mobile missiles, the main purpose of which was to survive an enemy nuclear strike and then to retaliate. This deadlock was broken at the July 1969 meeting.30 Henceforth, Soviet strategy would shift from a near-exclusive focus on pre-emption to a greater focus on retaliation. Even as the Soviet Union acquired credible second-strike capabilities this did not dispel fears within the General Staff about the survivability of the command and control system, and thus the ability to launch retaliatory strikes.31 One notable outcome of the decision to build multiple types of missiles was that it raised some fears in the US that this was actually a deliberate policy choice by the Soviets to achieve ‘superiority’ over the Americans. The explanation that Brezhnev’s aim was largely one of satisfying the needs of the missile industry was too mundane. The focus on missile survivability and developing means for retaliation also undercut the more hawkish American claims that Soviet nuclear modernization programs in the 1970s were mainly intended to increase the USSR’s first strike potential.32
Ideas about limited nuclear war were not received with official endorsement by the Soviet leadership although this did not prevent the General Staff from thinking about the topic. Opposition was based on the strongly-held belief that it was impossible to contain a nuclear war—nuclear use by one side would merely lead to nuclear use by the other and trigger further escalation rather than serve to de-escalate the conflict. There was a similar rejection of the notion that use of nuclear weapons could effectively act as ‘symbols’ to de-escalate. Among the reasons for this rejection was that by adopting such Western beliefs about limited nuclear war, they feared they would be falling into a trap that would potentially leave them vulnerable to ‘escalation dominance’. The General Staff also contemplated different responses to US ‘selective’ nuclear strikes, such as proportional retaliation, escalation, de-escalation, limiting attacks to European or strictly military targets, and so forth. Regardless of Soviet thinking and debates about these issues, even within the General Staff, this did not overturn the doctrinal opposition to limited nuclear war.33
Until the early 1980s, there was a divergence between the official line that the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of the Warsaw Pact would result in a full nuclear response and the lack of General Staff planning for such a contingency. The official line emphasizing strategic-theatre linkage was still considered valuable as this disposed of Western ideas about limited nuclear war and escalation control.34 By the late 1970s-early 1980s, more attention was given to these ideas to include intra-war negotiations for the termination of nuclear use. There was also increasing recognition by the Soviets from the mid-1970s onwards that a war in Europe might remain non-nuclear.35
Meanwhile, the Soviet build-up of theatre nuclear forces in Europe was intended to reduce the probability that NATO would use nuclear weapons and therefore to keep the war at a conventional level where the Soviets would have an advantage. In the Soviet view, NATO would be unable to make a decision to initiate nuclear use in less than four or five days. This meant that any Warsaw Pact strike on NATO would have to make sufficient military gains in this short period. Greater attention was paid to developing conventional strategies and force structures that emphasized speed.36 For instance, between 1977 and 1986 the General Staff published a three-volume ‘Strategy of Deep Operations (Global and Theatre)’ that included a conventional-only offensive into West Germany stopping at the Rhine. New combined-arms military formations, such as the Operational Manoeuvre Groups, were designed to achieve quick breakthroughs that would not only penetrate deep into NATO territory and pave the way for the main second echelon units, but would also be responsible for capturing NATO tactical nuclear weapons and overrunning airbases to prevent the Alliance from gaining air superiority. The deep penetrations and inter-mingling of Soviet and NATO forces was expected to complicate Alliance decision-making about escalating to nuclear use.
General Andrian Danilevich, who worked in the Soviet General Staff in the 1970s, explained how early in that decade the Soviet military began to assume a broader range of combat operations. ‘Kahn’s theory of escalation’ was accepted, which meant that the previous concept of using nuclear weapons in the initial period was rejected. ‘A new periodization of war was worked out. I took part in that. It consisted of the following: first a period of nonnuclear activity, then a period of limited use of nuclear weapons; then a period of unlimited use of nuclear weapons; then the concluding period.’ By the middle of the 1970s the ‘period of non-nuclear operations’ had ‘expanded in both space and time parameters’ and by the end it was concluded that ‘the whole war could possibly begin and end without the use of nuclear weapons’.37 A growing emphasis was placed on conventional air operations as an alternative to nuclear strikes. To keep NATO nuclear forces in check, and thereby achieve ‘escalation dominance’, the SS-20, a more survivable and accurate missile than its predecessors, began to be deployed in 1977.
In Soviet eyes, and for many Western observers, the SS-20 represented a qualitative change in the European balance of power. Unable to achieve ‘superiority’ at the strategic level, the SS-20’s ability to eliminate NATO’s option for nuclear first use, which was the basis for the Alliance’s deterrence strategy, gave the Soviets ‘superiority’ at the regional level. Europe could now be held ‘hostage’ to a Soviet conventional strike. Ironically, the various elements of the Operational Manoeuvre Group would only come together in 1987, when Gorbachev’s decision to sign the INF Treaty eliminated the nuclear cover provided by the SS-20 that was a central feature of the concept.38
On the other hand, by the early 1980s, the Soviets faced another, arguably more pressing problem, namely the erosion of conventional superiority. Holding NATO nuclear assets at risk to facilitate conventional war was useful only so long as superiority at the conventional level was maintained. But with NATO’s increasing high-technology lead, which helped off-set Soviet numerical advantage—a trend that Soviet planners recognized would be certain to worsen in the coming decades—and with their adoption of concepts aimed at interdicting Soviet second and third echelon formations (‘Follow-on Forces Attack’), Soviet confidence in their conventional lead plummeted.