When Nixon was first briefed on the strategic nuclear balance, he was quite taken aback by the extent to which Soviet capabilities had improved since the Cuban missile crisis. Whereas at that time, the US had a ‘five-to-one’ advantage in missiles, by early 1969 the amount of damage each side could inflict was roughly equal, a development Nixon referred to as an ‘astounding change’.1 Afterwards, Nixon would often compare the nuclear balance at the time he came to office with that which existed in 1962. The main implication of this was that with Soviet attainment of an ‘assured destruction’ capability, Soviet foreign policy would become more aggressive. Unlike the era of superiority when the US still had a ‘first strike capability’, the US now had much less credibility if it chose to escalate in a crisis and therefore had less room to manoeuver in international affairs, especially in its dealings with allies.2
He was supported in this view by his Assistant for National Security Affairs, Henry Kissinger, a significant figure in academic strategic studies since the mid-1950s. Kissinger had shown some skill in clarifying and then popularizing some of the key theories and concepts that had been under development since the mid-1950s. He had acted as a weathervane for changes in the intellectual climate, reflecting the dominant ideas of any period yet able to anticipate movements in fashion. He later described his views on joining the Nixon Administration as sharing with his former academic colleagues a fear that ‘Strategic forces, at once highly vulnerable and extremely powerful, could in a crisis tempt one side to strike first, especially if it feared that it might lose its means of retaliation to a first blow’. He thus favoured ‘a conscious policy of stabilizing the arms race’. He parted company, however, with the academic community on the sources of Soviet conduct. ‘I did not accept the proposition that unilateral restraint in weapons procurement on our part would evoke a comparable response from the Kremlin’.3 Kissinger noted that in 1962 the Soviets did not blockade Berlin because they were afraid of a pre-emptive attack, but that as of 1969 this was no longer a realistic fear.4
Unfortunately for the Nixon administration, their ability to redress this negative trend with new military programmes was limited. The failures of Vietnam policy, the evidence of low morale and indiscipline in the services, and concern over the level of military spending and its effect on the economy all meant that its advice was treated warily. In the early years of the Administration the political issue was whether new programmes could be initiated against the pressure, particularly strong in Congress, for unilateral restraint. Kissinger records an argument before the inauguration with John Erlichman, in charge of Nixon’s domestic programmes, in which Erlichman had asserted that ‘everyone’ knew that Defense had been getting too much. Consequently, though Kissinger was interested in revising strategic doctrine, this did not seem a propitious moment for anything too strong.
Although Nixon had campaigned on a ‘security gap’ platform, calling for clear US superiority the initial pronouncements of the new Administration were moderate. The first studies in the National Security Council, under Kissinger’s direction, demonstrated that the sort of superiority the US had enjoyed in the past was now unobtainable. Kissinger encouraged Nixon to settle for something more modest, to be described as ‘sufficiency’. Talking of ‘sufficiency’ meant rejecting ‘superiority’ as a goal for the US arsenal. Nixon recognized that to attempt ‘superiority’ would escalate the arms race. Conversely, ‘parity’ was viewed as equivalent to ‘inferiority’, and Nixon insisted ‘We’re not settling for second place’. From a ‘diplomatic standpoint this would be devastating to our policies all over the world and I do not intend to allow this to happen—whatever the political consequences may be’.5
But as a concept strategic ‘sufficiency’ was vague and it was not clear how it could guide the US nuclear posture. A definition was formalized in National Security Decision Memorandum 16. It consisted of four parts: (1) the need to maintain a second strike capability to deter an all-out surprise attack on US nuclear forces; (2) maintaining forces to ensure the USSR would have no incentive to strike first in a crisis; (3) to deny the Soviets the ability to inflict more damage on the US than they would suffer; and (4) deploying defences to limit damage from small attacks or accidental launches.6
Despite this definition, controversy remained over whether an additional condition for ‘sufficiency’ was having the capability to ‘emerge in a position of relative advantage from any level of strategic nuclear warfare’. It might help deter the Soviets if the US could show that it could recover faster from nuclear exchanges than they could.7 The main problem was that the official version of ‘sufficiency’ provided little in the way of practical guidance to the bureaucracy. When Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard was asked what was meant by ‘sufficiency’ he replied: ‘It means that it’s a good word to use in a speech. Beyond that it doesn’t mean a God-damned thing’.8 Other officials admitted that the concept was unclear and elastic,9 and therefore it did not provide any new operational criteria in force planning.
For those reared in the McNamara tradition, a lack of specificity here was unforgivable. For Nixon’s new Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, set in a quite different mould to McNamara, this was less of a worry. He was a hard-liner, who had once written a book advocating a first-strike capability.10 As a Congressman he had learnt the importance of ‘threatmanship’ in selling weapons projects and therefore based his own rationales for new systems on postulated increases in Soviet military capabilities. If there was any doctrine with which he might be associated it was the doctrine of the triad. This required that each leg of the triad of ICBMs, SLBMs and bombers approximated towards an independent second-strike capability. This created a ‘mutually supporting deterrent capability’. The word ‘synergism’ was discovered, stripped of theological connotations, and taken to refer to the combined triad creating a deterrent effect greater than the sum of the individual parts.
The case for the triad lay in the danger in putting all ‘eggs in one basket’. If the deterrent depended solely on one type of delivery vehicle, then the adversary’s offensive problem would be simplified. To mount an attack simultaneously on three completely different types of system would be an awesome task, one system might be manageable. Furthermore while bombers, ICBMs, and SLBMs might all be able to mount a formidable second strike against cities, each had some unique feature which could allow for extra options: the ICBM for example had greater accuracy, allowing for attacks on discrete targets, while the human control over the bomber made possible second thoughts after launching. However, although these arguments justified a variety in offensive systems, they did not necessarily mean that all types must be maintained in large numbers or at an equivalent level of modernity.
The force of the concept of the triad in this analysis derived less from intellectual compulsion than political convenience. The ‘participatory management’ approach of Laird returned to the Services much of the autonomy lost under McNamara. In return for this they agreed to respect budget ceilings. By splitting up the budget into three equal parts competition between the Services was limited. While making political sense, this inhibited the development of a coherent strategic perspective at the centre. It meant that the civilian leadership accepted the pre-existent division of responsibilities between the Services and showed them unwilling to challenge military judgment on the structures and systems deemed necessary to fulfil military responsibilities. The political relationships encouraged conservatism in force planning and stability was achieved by replacing obsolete systems with follow-on systems. Otherwise Laird contented himself with justifying new weapons as an insurance policy, a prudent investment in case something terrible happened in the future.
His successor, James Schlesinger, a RAND alumnus, observed to a Congressional Committee: ‘To some extent I think the rationale of the Triad was a rationalization’.11 As such, despite its political value in helping to maintain the bureaucratic calm inside the Pentagon, the triad concept, like that of sufficiency, was an inadequate basis with which to confront a Congress supported by assorted lobbyists that was becoming increasingly well-informed and sophisticated on strategic arms issues.
And one of the questions which we have to ask ourselves as a country is what in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?13
The Nixon Administration therefore did not so much try to counter the Soviet military build-up as to manage its consequences through a process of detente. A vital element in this was the negotiations over arms control between the United States and the Soviet Union. These talks therefore provided a significant, and increasingly controversial, focal point for debate throughout the decade. They were supposed to mark the end of the Cold War, an era of negotiation to replace the passing of an era of confrontation. The message, and a proper sense of progress, was contained in the titles of President Nixon’s annual foreign policy reports to Congress: 1970—A New Strategy for Peace; 1971—Building the Peace; 1972—The Emerging Structure of Peace; 1973—Shaping a Durable Peace.
Detente did not turn out as expected or hoped. It only really became embedded in European politics as agreements were reached which recognised the division of Germany and allowed West Germany to develop its own relations with Warsaw Pact countries. In that respect it took the sting out of the core conflict that had led to the Cold War in the first place. With its new ‘Ostpolitik’, West Germany, and Europeans in general, now had a stake in good East-West relations and worked hard to deflect the growing hawkishness in American policy. The hawkishness reflected concern about Soviet actions in those areas of the third world where Cold War lines had never been drawn clearly and where the two sides’ interests continued to clash. The effort struggled most because of events in the Middle East and Africa, but underlying the shift in American opinion was the conviction that Moscow’s assertiveness in those regions might have something to do with its heavy military investments.
Concern about American inaction in the face of this assertiveness led into a critique of detente that also included warnings against conceding any nuclear advantages to the Soviet Union. This was a sharp shift from the view current at the start of the 1970s that nuclear weapons were far more of a problem than the Soviet Union, and that the co-operation of the Soviet Union should be sought to deal with the problem. The old rhetoric of the Cold War appeared overdrawn; the Soviet Union was seen as an unattractive but cautious power, bound to the status quo and, on the evidence of the past decade, less ready than the United States to resort to arms in a crisis. It was unwise to be overly alarmed by the Soviets as it was to alarm them. Emphasis was placed on the importance of restraint to create the necessary stability. By the end of the decade the Soviet Union was once again presented as menacing the West. After years of being on the defensive over the past neglect of America’s social problems and the folly of American global interventionism, the conservatives rediscovered their voice, claiming that the Kremlin, still wedded to expansionist goals, was incapable of reciprocating American restraint.
Now conservative pundits deplored the evident reluctance to address foreign-policy problems with military means, even in areas where the Soviet Union was relying on a militarised approach. The issue came to a head at the start of 1980 following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. While this was a clear sign that the Soviet Union was prepared to exert its power ruthlessly, the fact that it was considered necessary reflected a failure of its earlier political attempts to establish a Marxist regime in Afghanistan. The consequent Soviet experience against determined, but poorly armed, Afghan tribesmen served to remind the Kremlin of the difficulties of this sort of exercise. Earlier interventions, using Cuban troops, such as those in Angola and Ethiopia, had not been walkovers. Nonetheless, the Soviet Union throwing its weight around the third world generated alarm in the West, particularly as the exercise of Soviet power was coming to be too close for comfort to regions vital to the economies of the West, such as the oil wells of Arabia and the mines of Africa. The trend of the West during the 1970s—to avoid further military entanglements in the third world—was reversed, with the decade ending with a plan for a Rapid Deployment Force to confront any Soviet excursions into the Gulf area.
This shift in American perceptions of Soviet power and policy provided the backdrop to discussions of nuclear strategy. The particular vehicle for the discussion was the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). These began in November 1969. A first round was successfully concluded in May 1972, with an ABM Treaty and an Interim Agreement on Offensive Arms. The inspiration behind SALT had been to keep deployment of ABMs down to a minimum and this was achieved by limiting the number of ABM launchers to 200 for each side. This number was halved in 1974 and the US eventually mothballed its system. The Soviet Union maintained its small system around Moscow, probably with China in mind. SALT also embraced offensive arms and here the negotiations were much more difficult. ABMs were a distinct type of weapon only just starting to be deployed. The vast research and development effort in ABMs had palpably failed to produce convincing and cost-effective solutions to the many problems of effective ballistic missile defence, for the tolerance of failure was very low. Because both the US and Soviet ABM programmes had lost momentum, they were easy to stop altogether with arms control measures and there were good doctrinal reasons, at least for the Americans, as to why this should be done. The same conditions did not apply to offensive weapons. Both sides had many weapons which, though notionally comparable, displayed important variations.
It was now possible to place the weapons into clear categories and count them. Over the 1960s the quality of the images from reconnaissance satellites and the extent of their coverage had improved dramatically. Military bases could be located with precision and their contents identified. This both aided counter-force targeting but also the negotiation and verification of arms control agreements. Because the existence of these satellites, though widely discussed, remained an official secret (until the Carter Administration) they were referred to as ‘National Technical Means of Verification’.
One problem lay in the uncertainty about the most important goals for offensive arms limitation. The concept of mutual assured destruction did not indicate any value in reducing offensive weapons. If anything, excessive reductions could be destabilizing if they went past the point where destruction could no longer be assured. The most compelling argument was that, as existing force levels guaranteed assured destruction for both sides, extra weapons provided no benefit and an agreement not to build them could save resources which could then be put to better use.14 In addition, both sides had to accept explicitly the futility of continuing the arms race and to agree on restraint, thereby creating the atmosphere in which they might settle political differences. In this way, SALT became the centrepiece of the detente process. By declaring an honourable draw in the military sphere it would be possible to come to terms in the political sphere.
The interim five-year agreement of 1972 put a freeze on numbers of missile launchers, with an allowance for the momentum in the Soviet construction programme. The US was allowed 1054 ICBMs and 656 SLBMs, the Soviet Union 1409 ICBMs, and 950 SLBMs,15 with a sub-limit of 308 ‘heavy’ ICBMs. Implicit in the agreement was a trade of Soviet numerical superiority in missiles for US superiority in technology and bombers. This was not altogether appreciated in the Senate, where Senator Jackson secured an amendment requesting the President to ‘seek a future treaty that, inter alia, would not limit the United States to levels of intercontinental strategic forces inferior to the limits provided for the Soviet Union’.16 Under these terms negotiations for a more permanent Treaty proceeded. Apparent success came in Vladivostok in November 1974, when President Ford and Secretary Brezhnev agreed on a framework for a new Treaty which would allow ceilings of 2400 strategic nuclear delivery vehicles (SNDVs), that is bombers and missiles, and dealt with MIRVs by counting not warheads but MIRVed missiles, for which a sub-ceiling of 1320 was set.
Unfortunately, it was not found possible to transform this simple if undemanding framework into a Treaty. New complicating issues emerged connected with a Soviet missile (SS-19) that disrupted the distinction between ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ ICBMs, and, most important, the cruise missile which was both a unilateral American advantage and new and versatile.17 These pilotless aircraft with continuous propulsion were descended from the German V-1 of World War II, as ballistic missiles were descended from the V-2. After experiments in the 1950s, they had been neglected because of their slow speed, high fuel consumption and consequently small warhead (though the Snark was available as a strategic weapon until 1961). Improvements in munitions design and jet engines, combined with a guidance system allowed the attainment of impressive accuracy as the missile could recognise and adjust to the terrain on the approach to the target. This helped to create a weapon with a promise of great versatility, able in theory to operate at a variety of ranges, with either conventional or nuclear warheads and from a variety of launch platforms, though still at a relatively slow speed. The versatility which was a military advantage turned out to be a disadvantage in negotiations because of the uncertainty about how they were best categorised.
It took until late 1977 (by which time the Democrats had returned to office under the leadership of President Jimmy Carter) to construct a new framework to sort out these and other problems and then almost another two years to turn this into a Treaty. Even then the result was hardly definitive. This second Treaty was to last until only 1985 and would limit delivery vehicles to 2250, with sub-limits on MIRVed missiles and bombers carrying air-launched cruise missiles (1320), on MIRVed missiles (1200), on MIRVed ICBMs (820) and ‘heavy’ MIRVed ICBMs (308). It was still necessary to put a number of particularly intractable problems, including ground- and sea-launched cruise missiles, and mobile missiles, into a three-year protocol to allow time for further negotiation and to relegate the controversial Soviet TU-22 M Backfire bomber to a Letter of Understanding appended to the Treaty.
By this time the broad consensus supporting SALT had been badly shaken. The process was criticized for not doing enough to reduce numbers, for stimulating the arms race because of the need to gain military endorsement by promises of new weapons, for exacerbating rather than calming East-West tensions, and for failing to solve the pressing strategic problems of the day. In January 1980, after it had already become evident that it would be difficult to muster the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate for Treaty ratification, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan made further progress impossible and President Carter asked for the vote to be deferred. SALT had become an unhappy affair, projecting and reflecting the doubts and uncertainties of the 1970s. The strain of trying to achieve some symmetry in force structures turned the negotiations into a source of dispute rather than comity. As agreement was found at force levels high enough not to disturb or inconvenience the military planning of either side, the liberal supporters of SALT discovered to their dismay that arms control and arms competition need not be exclusive activities.
The first SALT agreement, and especially the ABM Treaty, suggested that some consensus had been reached between Moscow and Washington about the meaning of the nuclear age. Herbert York wrote about the ‘common understandings about basic issues’ that were ‘clearly implicit’ in the Agreement. Among the most important of these was an understanding that ‘the deployment of defensive weapons can accelerate the arms race just as much as the deployment of offensive weapons’; ‘defence of the nation against a massive nuclear attack is impossible’; and ‘a strategic situation of approximate parity and mutual deterrence is the best that is now within reach’.18 This is what the liberal arms controllers had been saying all along! Kissinger presented the Agreement in similar terms. In a briefing to Congress he spoke of how, despite deep and bitter rivalries, the vast power at each side’s disposal created ‘a certain commonality of outlook, a sort of interdependence for survival between the two of us … now that both we and the Soviet Union have begun to find that each increment of power does not necessarily represent an increment of usable political strength’.19
This confidence did not last. The interim agreement on offensive arms allowed the Soviet Union to continue to modernize its strategic forces, and that is what it did. Despite the previous assumption that the build-up would stop at the magic figure of 1000 ICBMs, the size of the US force, thus representing equality with the US, it eventually built over 1500 ICBMs. Instead of the optimistic propositions with which the decade had begun a much more pessimistic one took hold: this could only be explained in terms of a drive for superiority of a sort that would allow the USSR to fight and ‘win’ a nuclear war. The dominant view in the intelligence community in 1969 had been that: ‘We believe that the Soviets recognize the enormous difficulties of any attempt to achieve strategic superiority of such order as to significantly alter the strategic balance.’ Seven years later the critics persuaded the Ford Administration (Gerald Ford had taken over as President after Nixon resigned in 1974) to allow some of their number to conduct a counter exercise to the annual national intelligence estimate on Soviet strategic forces. This ‘Team B’ exercise unsurprisingly concluded that Moscow was thinking seriously about a nuclear victory. The ‘home team’ assessment left the question more open than in previous years although the next year it reverted to its more sceptical view about Soviet intentions.20
The most persistent source of error among Western arms race and arms control analysts has been of an ethnocentric character … we should discard the last vestiges of the notion that there is a general theoretical enlightenment towards which all arms race actors must necessarily strain.21
to perceive the Soviet leaders as thinking and seeing things as we do, and, in effect, to project into Soviet affairs a mirror-image of ourselves and our own concepts. The consequence of such an approach … is that it has led to serious misjudgments in understanding and forecasting Soviet behaviour.22
The observation was not wholly unfair and was reminiscent of some liberal critiques of arms race behaviour in the United States. These noted the tendency to justify the US exploiting some new technology by presuming a similar Soviet interest. Arguments for unilateral restraint were based largely on an apprehension that moves considered defensive by the US would appear fearsome and offensive from a Soviet perspective.
For example, Jeremy Stone, one of the leading members of the arms control community, wrote in 1967 on methods of improving the strategic dialogue between the two super-powers to improve mutual understanding. Stone analysed the many sources of interference in communications on strategic matters that could impede the development of the necessary understanding. He observed the danger of ignoring the other’s point of view, of forgetting ‘that ours is not the universal language and that an apparent stupidity can mask a fully developed opinion of an altogether different kind. The presumption of adversary error is a serious obstacle to effective persuasion.’ One of his conclusions was relevant to the debate of a decade later. He stressed the primary importance of determining the goals of US policy. ‘So long as we remain unsure of the strategic relations which we and the Soviets ought to seek, we shall be unable to speak and act with complete assurance about them.’ Stone cited ‘our ambivalence over strategic superiority’ as a clear example of how different answers to the desirability of superiority would result in quite different policies.23
Gray took matters further, suggesting that if doctrine was to converge it would be along the lines preferred by the Soviet Union, that ‘strategic numerical appearances were the stuff of which international respect and influence were made’, and that ‘the best way to prevent war is to be able to fight it effectively’.24 The superior Soviet understanding he detected came particularly in the political sphere. Military power gave strength to the international political offensive of the USSR. Lawrence Whetten warned in 1976 how this new strategic posture served as ‘a back-drop for the conduct of a more flexible foreign policy that may, when appropriate, include an increase in their willingness to accept risk in the face of challenge or to be more assertive under favourable circumstances’. In the same volume William Van Cleave wrote of the Soviet concept that military force ‘confers meaningful political power, and thus that inferiority is a political liability and superiority an important political asset’.25 By compiling statements from the Soviet military, a picture soon emerged of a constant yearning for superiority in all departments, a belief that the outcome of any war would be favourable to the cause of socialism if the proper preparations had been taken with men and equipment.26 Instead of the US now waiting for the Soviet Union to catch up with its strategic wisdom, the critics now argued that perhaps it was the US that needed to learn.
Given the priority of strategic forces, when both sides possess weapons capable of destroying many times over all life on earth, neither the addition of new armaments nor an increase in their destructive power can bring any substantial military—and still less political—advantage.27
In November 1978 a number of US Senators met President Brezhnev, who reminded them of the lasting effects of the ‘losses of the Soviet people’ during the war. He added ‘We do not want to unleash a nuclear war because we are not crazy’, and then went on to remind the Senators of the retaliatory capability of the USSR: ‘We will never be the first to let such weapons fly. I will still have time to respond. There will be no more United States. But we will still get it in the neck’.28
What this mainly indicated was that Brezhnev could not think of occasions when resort to war would be politically expedient. Unlike the United States, which never experienced effective military inferiority, the USSR had undergone this experience and disliked it. The climb-down over Cuba and, probably as important, the irritation at the ease with which American forces moved into Vietnam in 1965, convinced the Soviet leaders that they did need a form of parity to ‘sober the imperialists’. The growth of Soviet military might could be understood in terms of the correlation of forces, the sum of the economic, political, moral, and military forces behind the contending parties in the international arena. Soviet writings assured readers that this correlation was moving in favour of socialism, a proposition that would be difficult to support empirically unless major weight was attached to the military factor.29
The main benefit of the improving condition was considered to be the realism induced in the imperialist camp as its room for manoeuvre became constrained. Thus parity in strategic forces was ‘a special factor behind the realization by Western ruling circles of the new realities of our day and the corresponding correction of their political line’.30 Such a view of the political utility of nuclear power was more modest and defensive than others attributed to the Soviet Union, but it did indicate a belief that there was some positive relationship between military and political power.
If this was the case then a disparity permitted by SALT could in principle affect overall Soviet—and American—foreign policy, emboldening one while restraining the other. For this reason many of the debates surrounding SALT, between and within the superpowers, was over the proper definitions of parity. Focussing so heavily on this aspect of the overall relationship exaggerated its importance and increased its salience, encouraging the tabulation of strategic credits and debits and the codification of differences between superpowers. There were distinct asymmetries between the two force structures and it was difficult to decide what weight to attach to them. The Americans had more bombers and a more advanced technology; their forces were MIRVed earlier. On the other hand the ICBMs which dominated the Soviet force structure were more numerous, much larger than the American equivalents and eventually, when all MIRVed, could carry more warheads of larger individual yield. A larger Soviet SLBM force was being constructed but this seemed to be of inferior quality and efficiency to that of the US. In addition to weapons of intercontinental range the Soviet Union had a substantial force directed solely against European targets. On the Western side medium-range forces were much smaller, but the relevant weapons could reach the Soviet Union and they included British and French missiles and bombers as well as those of the United States. The Soviet Union had to consider the growing Chinese nuclear force to the East about which the US lost interest after Nixon’s rapprochement with China. There was thus no simple formula to describe parity.
become a source of serious diplomatic and military miscalculation. Opponents may feel that they can exploit a favourable imbalance by means of political pressure, as Hitler did so skilfully in the 1930s, particularly with Neville Chamberlain at Berchtesgaden. Friends may believe that a lack of willingness on our part to accept less than equality indicates a lack of resolve to uphold our end of the competition and a certain deficiency in staying power. Our own citizens may doubt our capacity to guard the nation’s interests.31
His successor in the Carter Administration, Harold Brown, also accepted that ‘essential equivalence’ was important; it ‘guards against any danger that the Soviets might be seen as superior—even if the perception is not technically justified’.32 The difficulty was that once subjective factors were accorded critical importance in the formation of a deterrent posture then all aspects of military power became of potential importance and nothing could be discounted.
The first problem was that there was no self-evident index of military power. The impression of the balance created could vary according to which measure was chosen, for example delivery vehicles or warheads. The more an index was sought which conveyed military effectiveness the more difficult the calculations became. Two popular measures became equivalent megatonnage, which acknowledged that destructive power does not grow proportionately with yield and indicated counter-city potential, and lethality, which indicated counter-force potential.33 Schlesinger argued that it would be a mistake to allow any major asymmetry to develop between the United States and the Soviet Union in the ‘basic technological and other factors that shape force effectiveness’.34 The greater the concern with factors that shape force effectiveness (target structure; defences; reliability; tactics; as well as accuracy, yield, and numbers of warheads) the more complicated the analysis became, and the more unknowables and unquantifiables were involved. Yet the anxiety was supposedly over how simple-minded politicians and other amateurs in military matters might perceive matters. Their views on the military balance could not be expected to reflect arcane and complex calculations. If visible disparities did matter, it was in the crude and quantifiable measures, such as delivery vehicles. The desire to construct measures that conveyed real force effectiveness still supposed that what mattered was the real quality of the hardware rather than subjective perceptions.35
The second problem was the lack of evidence (market research) used to justify the stress on ‘perception’. The only serious empirical work on the topic found that, in a variety of relevant publics (in Europe, Japan, and in the Middle East), there was a lack of agreement on which superpower was ahead, and that a large number of respondents believed that the question had little point because the two superpowers could so easily destroy each other. The study demonstrated that the issues were treated with great common sense and perspective and that there was little disposition to take radical political steps on the basis of marginal shifts in super-power capabilities.36 Similarly, opinion poll data in the late 1950s had shown US Allies believing the USSR to be forging ahead in military power, without this making the slightest difference to their allegiance to the Western side (which if anything strengthened with perception of gains in Soviet military strength).37
It could be argued that the problem, if there was one, had much to do with the collapse of self-confidence in the United States following the debacle in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, particularly when contrasted with what seemed to be the clear and positive view on the political value of military power held in the Kremlin. America appeared hesitant and fumbling, overwhelmed by the limits of power, whereas the Soviet Union, in propaganda for both internal and external purposes, took care to project a confident image, with a world correlation of forces moving inexorably in its favour. The perpetual lobbying in the United States encouraged a harping on American weaknesses and Soviet strengths. The concept of essential equivalence contributed only a crude political insight, pointing to something so transitory and elusive that it could form no consistent guide to force planning and was of only slight relevance to international crises.
The political utility and military effectiveness of a given structure of armed forces exist in different worlds: one, the world of appearances, impressions, and the culturally determined value judgements of international politics; the other, the world of physical reality in actual warfare.38
This line of argument pushed strategic theory into quite the opposite direction from the 1960s, away from the emphasis on rationality and the construction of unambiguous deterrent threats to concern with the imperfection of cognitive and decision processes and the consequent inadequacy of perceptions of military strength, no matter how well they had been constructed. John Steinbruner illustrated the shift by suggesting that the problem in the game of ‘Chicken’, beloved by the 1950s/1960s strategists, was that a typical decision-maker when playing the game ‘would not observe his opponent’s behavior at all as the cars approached each other. Rather, he would execute a preestablished program for driving down the center of the road and would notice only whether the line still ran between his wheels.’39
This had very little to do with operational planning. Attempts to develop more dynamic measures of nuclear strength depended on modelling nuclear exchanges in which assumptions would still have to be made about what targets might be struck and why. More seriously, a discussion on the possible difference an increment in military power might make to how another acted in a crisis missed the larger point about the amount of destructive power both sides could deploy. Essential Equivalence could be taken as a euphemism for Assured Destruction. Moreover, the concern that the Soviet Union might be onto something in its military build-up was less about clever ways to influence the way people thought about nuclear relationships than about clever ways to conduct nuclear operations. In this respect the argument was bound up with more profound, although also inconclusive notions, about the morality and prudence of relying on assured destruction.