The Western debate often took the appearance of being between a focus on the ‘Soviet threat’ or the ‘nuclear threat’ (‘red or dead’ in the earliest version). This was especially the case at the start of the 1980s as protest movements in Western countries challenged the Reagan Administration’s conviction that most of the world’s security problems could be traced to Moscow. The resultant debate forced into the open many of the particular dilemmas of nuclear strategy and gave strength to those who argued that this dilemma could only be resolved by measures of radical disarmament—multilateral if possible but unilateral if necessary.
The ascendant view in Washington was that after years of accumulating military strength the Soviet behemoth was at last on the move. The invasion of Afghanistan, following closely on the less direct interventions in Angola and Ethiopia, was taken as confirmation of a dangerous new stage in East-West relations. The Carter Administration had spent its last, troubled year identifying the Gulf as a new area of vital American interest, boycotting the Olympic games, encouraging rearmament and devising a new nuclear doctrine. Nevertheless, Carter still nurtured a lingering hope that, having demonstrated resolve, constructive relations could be re-established with the Soviet Union. By contrast President Reagan was apparently convinced of the need to prepare for a decisive showdown with the Soviet Union.
So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.2
The Reagan Administration’s combative instincts were tempered by the lack of enthusiasm in Moscow for a fight. With the leadership sobered by frustrating experiences in Africa and Afghanistan there were no new Soviet adventures in the 1980s comparable to those of the previous decade. Moscow appeared content for the United States to draw political fire for its interventions in Central America and the Middle East, while keeping a determinedly low profile for itself. The Soviet leadership saw benefit in appearing as the voice of openness and sweet reason.
The nuclear protest movements that took form and flourished during this period were the descendants of those that had come to life protesting the fallout from atmospheric tests and the terrors of an arms race in the 1950s. The new movements added to their fear of nuclear war, an analysis of the dangers of America’s Cold War strategy, and in particular of the implications of ‘extended deterrence’. The United States promised to use all the means at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, to prevent its allies from being overrun by the conventional might of the Warsaw Pact. This American nuclear guarantee was a commitment upon which Western Europe depended, which the Soviet Union appeared to take seriously, yet for which it had proved to be almost impossible to plan sensibly.3 The new protest movements took root first in Europe in reaction to measures designed to shore up extended deterrence.
Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense had stressed the importance of ‘coupling’ US nuclear forces to the defence of Europe and identified it as a major reason behind his advocacy of a change in doctrine.4 Schlesinger made it clear that he would consider first use of nuclear weapons to fulfil Alliance obligations, which he distinguished from initiating a war in a surprise first strike. The sort of targets often specified—airfields, submarine bases, oil fields and railway marshalling yards—were of obvious military relevance. The whole emphasis on nuclear weapons as precise instruments of low collateral damage, rather than being blunt and crude weapons of mass destruction, encouraged this sort of target structure. Such strikes would need to be related to the situation on the ground. If avoiding collateral damage was vital then the most appropriate targets would be at sea, but in practice the issue was most likely to arise when an army was being pushed back to the Channel through populated areas.
The question of whether new technologies could be used to improve NATO’s over-all defensive position was first considered in the 1970s in the context of innovations in conventional weapons. Developments in the ability to find, track, identify, target, and destroy enemy units, from any distance and with great precision, at all times of day and in all weather, raised hope that forces configured essentially for defensive purposes would benefit from these new technologies and so be able to hold back a much larger invading force. Some engagements during the later stages of the Vietnam War and, more impressively, during the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War of October 1973, convinced many that aircraft and tanks were being made virtually obsolete by precision weapons. This enthusiasm dampened somewhat with the growing awareness of opportunities for counter-measures, the possibilities for the exploitation of the new technologies in offensive tactics, and problems in the actual organization of forces to operate with and against these weapons.
The hope was that these new conventional weapons would raise the nuclear threshold. Often using similar arguments to McNamara, Schlesinger spoke of ‘the gradual evolution towards increasing stress on the conventional components, a diminution of the threat of recourse to nuclear weapons’.5 To some surprise, this hope did not cause the same ructions within the Alliance as had McNamara’s push for the conventional option. This was because of a conscious desire to avoid the arguments of the 1960s, the more qualified claims made by the Americans, and the fact that Europeans managed to convince themselves that this sort of option was both effective (as shown in October 1973) and relatively inexpensive. However European governments showed no inclination to over-exert themselves in mapping out a new NATO strategy and, as it became apparent that the new technologies were of benefit without making a radical difference (except at a high cost), the enthusiasm waned and they contented themselves with incremental force improvements.
The question of the impact of both new conventional and nuclear technologies for the defence of Europe came together with renewed consideration of tactical nuclear weapons. Here Schlesinger encouraged modernization of an arsenal that was large but obsolete,6 again with the aim of controlling the level of violence in any conflict. As a topic for concerted intellectual effort, nuclear weapons based in the European theatre had been lying fallow for many years. The position reached in the 1960s was that the Europeans welcomed the presence of these shorter-range systems at the front line as a direct link between the defence of the continent and American nuclear forces, but there was very little idea as to how they could be put to good use in an actual conflict. The political pressure would be to delay use; and the weapons were of disproportionate yield for the tasks they might be expected to perform. They would cause immense collateral damage in the territory being defended.
In keeping with the general mood reflected by Schlesinger, there were a number of schemes put forward for the modernization of this arsenal, all with the aim of making its employment more precise and less damaging to those being defended, and thus more credible for deterrence. More than other sets of programmes relevant to the new doctrine, this occasioned a political row within NATO, which posed (with a number of more diversionary questions) the difficult question of how much nuclear use should be facilitated, weighing increments of credibility against the danger of premature moves towards Armageddon. The answer to this question was beyond the competence of a technical strategist—it was a political question over what was feared most—nuclear war or the Soviet Union.
The debate was triggered somewhat accidentally. One of the new ‘tailored’ nuclear munitions (the ‘neutron bomb’) enhanced radiation effects and reduced the others. It was designed to disable tank crews, and it became the subject of controversy in 1977 after it had been misleadingly characterized as a weapon that killed people and left property intact. As one that stressed rather than minimized the singularly nuclear effect of radiation it was an unfortunate advertisement for a strategy that aimed to use nuclear weapons interchangeably with their conventional counterparts. Nonetheless its limited impact on property was considered an attractive feature. Its designer was quoted not long before his death as describing it as ‘the most sane and moral weapon ever devised … When the war is over, the world is still intact.’7 In one of his last acts as President, Gerald Ford signed off on the weapon in November 1976. President Carter was unaware that such a weapon was being considered until he read about it in the Washington Post in June 1977.8 The administration was unprepared for the resultant furore. The President was embarrassed for he had spoken up to this point of his distaste for all nuclear weapons.
The public unease in Europe with this weapon demonstrated that the special fears aroused by any nuclear weapon, and the consequent impediments to their use in a crisis, could not be resolved simply by greater tailoring. The debate, in which both sides exaggerated the extent to which this innovation would make nuclear weapons ‘easier’ to use (their use in quantity would still be exceptionally unpleasant for the local population and could well trigger an unlimited Soviet response), left the whole matter as unresolved as ever.9 It was presented as a dangerous move to ‘blur’ the threshold between conventional and nuclear weapons. In the past, moves to ‘mini-nukes’ had been rejected for the same reasons. Carter was unhappy with this turn of events. He could see his Administration being attacked for deploying a weapon which was supposed to improve European security, yet European leaders were quiet on the issue. He could not see why he should take criticism for a weapon he disliked while the beneficiaries could not bring themselves to say much about it. In April 1978 he therefore deferred the deployment (which in effect meant cancellation). He later explained his decision: ‘We were talking about two or three billion dollars and we were talking about an enormous investment in tritium and a complete redesign of some of our tactical nuclear weapons. We were talking about an enormous amount of money.’10 He did recognise that taking the decision on his own, when his advisers had prepared the ground with European leaders for deployment, added to the consternation caused by a sudden change in policy direction. It encouraged fears that the US would struggle in the future to do what was necessary to support extended deterrence.
Other systems had also been hitherto ignored because they were of little relevance to either close combat or intercontinental exchanges. These were longer-range systems for ‘rear-echelon’ attacks (which might include reserve forces or communication systems) but which could also be directed against the cities of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union or, from the other side, against the European segment of NATO. Furthermore, the Soviet modernization priorities appeared to be focused on weapons of this range, of which the USSR in any case enjoyed a preponderance, rather than on its short-range systems, which remained large in yield and ‘dirty’ in effects, mocking any Western ideas of keeping a two-sided nuclear war in Europe ‘clean’ and confined to military targets.
The conceptual framework available to NATO for dealing with the questions of employment of nuclear weapons in the European theatre was inadequate and far less elaborate than that for dealing with central systems. The connection between mutual capabilities for intercontinental attacks on the cities of the super-powers (strategic) and intermediate-to-short-range attacks on military targets within Europe (theatre or tactical) broke down both with explicit moves, supported by Schlesinger, to use ‘strategic’ weapons to attack military targets related to a European battle, and the growing awareness of the vulnerability of European cities to weapons based in the continent, hitherto ignored or classified as ‘tactical’.
The link between the US nuclear forces and the defence of Europe, which dominated European perceptions of the issue, could be strengthened by extending the direct value of US strategic forces to fighting on NATO’s central front. On the other hand, a renewed stress on systems based in Europe as strategic threats to the USSR, with talk of a ‘Euro-strategic’ balance separate from the central strategic balance, might weaken the link. Schlesinger sought to take the first of these routes, so enhancing the credibility of the US nuclear guarantee. Yet the impact of this move was undermined by the growing willingness of the Europeans themselves, particularly the Germans, to move in exactly the opposite direction. This went against precedent and against notions of the ‘indivisibility of deterrence’. It was assumed that threats directed uniquely against Western Europe deserved, in part, a uniquely European response. The reasons for this were complex; the consolidation of strategic parity in SALT had focused attention on asymmetries lower down the line which were compounded by the growing obsolescence of NATO’s long-range theatre forces when compared with the modernization of Soviet forces. The consequence was that Western Europeans were not convinced that new targeting options for US ICBMs (or even for the 32 Poseidon SLBMs assigned to SACEUR) were sufficiently credible to fully deter a set of limited contingencies specifically related to the European theatre. The issue was put into play by a speech by the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt at a lecture in London in 1977 when he referred to this imbalance.11 Because of the debacle over the neutron bomb Pentagon officials and their European counterparts worked on this issue as a means to bolster the credibility of extended nuclear deterrence.
In December 1979 NATO eventually decided to deploy 572 American medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles on European soil. The feature of the decision that aroused the most satisfaction was that it had been made at all, given the domestic political difficulties it caused in a number of member states. The idea was to establish a distinctive regional response to the modernization of Soviet missiles designed solely for European use, without denying the essential link between the defence of Europe and America strategic forces. Thus, though American-owned and manned, the forces were to be ground-based so as to make their activation in the face of a Soviet advance credible. There were to be sufficient missiles to make a difference, but not so many as to suggest that they could fully satisfy NATO’s nuclear needs without involving the rest of the American nuclear arsenal.12
Up to the late 1970s most sections of the public seemed to have grown accustomed to living with the ‘bomb’. Public indifference combined with reassurances about how the arms race and the great powers’ worst tendencies towards conflict had been tamed. Public and experts alike now paused to consider whether this achievement could endure. A generation that had never really had to face up to the meaning of nuclear war suddenly discovered the potential for mass destruction, carefully nurtured for so long. To suggest that the international system had adjusted to the nuclear age led to accusations of complacency. Once again the fear of nuclear war began to exercise a powerful hold on the Western imagination.
The first stirrings of a revival in anti-nuclear protest had come during the arguments over the ‘neutron bomb’ in 1977–1978. Calmed by President Carter’s decision against deployment of these weapons, the protest movements began to grow rapidly in strength in the early 1980s, following the December 1979 decision on Tomahawk cruise and Pershing 2 ballistic missiles. During the early 1980s the membership of the anti-nuclear movements grew, massive demonstrations were mounted in most European capitals, although with protest more evident in the north than the south of the continent.13 An intellectual climate developed in which the risk of nuclear war and its awful consequences should it occur, was pushed to the fore. All this led to a vast literature and some notable movies—particularly The Day After (1983) and Threads (1984). Political parties, especially those on the centre and left, began to find the nuclear issue extraordinarily troublesome and divisive, although the unilateralist inclinations of activists was not so widely shared by electorates.
The domestic political impact of the anti-nuclear movements was considerable. Although individual elements of its platform had widespread appeal the package as a whole did not.14 Left-of-centre parties found themselves torn between those supporting the old NATO orthodoxies and the new radicalism. As a result, rather than sweeping to power on the basis of anti-nuclear sentiment the splits in these parties kept them out of government, which meant that policy in practice was framed by European governments who had little wish to tamper with NATO orthodoxy.
Nonetheless they could not ignore the anxieties being recorded in opinion polls and reflected in public debate, and this required that they took questions of arms control more seriously than they might have otherwise been inclined to do. They also encouraged the Reagan Administration to offer a more moderate image. Furthermore, NATO orthodoxy had been allowed to develop without serious critical attention for so long that merely subjecting it to public scrutiny could not help but raise awkward questions as to its internal consistency and strategic value.
Although the anti-nuclear movement naturally stressed a moral abhorrence of weapons of mass destruction, and based its appeal on a fear of nuclear war, its leaders sought to broaden their support by building up a strategic case for rapid, and if necessary unilateral, disarmament. In constructing this case they drew attention to the strategic concepts that had been influencing US policy-makers throughout the 1970s, with special prominence being given to the more extreme versions. The American debate on the future of nuclear strategy which had been developing among specialists in the 1970s spilled over into partisan European politics. Articles suggesting that ‘victory’ was possible in a nuclear war were considered particularly sinister.15 Statements by President Reagan helped to fuel the fears. In October 1981 the President noted that he ‘could see where you could have the exchange of tactical weapons against troops in the field without it bringing either one of the major powers to pushing the button’.16
This encouraged the view that the United States was simply becoming too dangerous an ally. The December 1979 decision was interpreted as a crucial move in the ‘second cold war’.17 It may have been the sensation of a return to the bad old days of sharp East-West tension that provided the most powerful stimulant to the new protest movements.
European war is to be one ‘choice’ or ‘option’ for the United States strategists, although what might appear to be ‘limited’ on that side of the Atlantic might appear to be spasmodic and apocalyptical on this. The cruise missiles which are being set up in Western Europe are the hardware designed for exactly such a ‘limited’ war, and the nations which harbour them are viewed, in this strategy, as launching platforms which are expendable in the interests of ‘Western’ defence.18
As an interpretation of the motives behind the cruise missile programme this was inadequate. Apart from anything else, these were unlikely instruments of limited nuclear war in that their range threatened Soviet territory, and there was no reason to believe that any war in which Soviet targets were being attacked could long stay limited.19 Nonetheless this theme of Europeans being put at risk by American policies and actions over which they had little influence picked up on real anxieties.
New peace research institutes, often with close links with the anti-nuclear movement, sponsored quite detailed studies of developments in military technology or the nuances of the military balance, and also came up with proposals for alternative strategies for defence based on conventional forces.20 In addition to demonstrating that it took defence seriously, the anti-nuclear movement took care to avoid accusations of being pro-Soviet, although that did not prevent the allegation that at the very least they served the Kremlin’s interest.21 In many ways their specific demands required more of the Soviet Union than the United States, for in seeking the dissolution of the two alliances they challenged the Soviet position in Eastern Europe. Moscow did not therefore endorse the protest movements with the sort of enthusiasm that might have been expected, even though inevitably it was far better placed to resist their demands than Western governments. Although the direct influence on Western policy remained limited, and the movements themselves began to decline after 1983, the indirect influences were significant, both in terms of encouraging moves to ease the East-West confrontation through arms control, and in illuminating many of the problems associated with the logic of nuclear deterrence.
In the United States anti-nuclear activism gained momentum slightly later than in Europe. The ‘nuclear freeze’ movement emerged late in the Carter administration, and became increasingly popular as Reagan’s aggressive rhetoric on nuclear war and his reluctance to engage in arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union stoked anxieties. In 1979, the anti-nuclear activist Randall Forsberg delivered a speech to other activists calling for the fragmented peace groups across the United States to advocate a moderate and bilateral (applicable to both the US and USSR) arms control proposal, rather than adopting a more ‘utopian’ disarmament position, as part of an effort to generate a popular movement. Her Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race demanded that the US and USSR should ‘adopt an immediate, mutual freeze on all further testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons’ and of their associated delivery vehicles. Once the production of new types of nuclear weapons was halted, this would then facilitate a reversing of the arms race. To have the freeze concept adopted as national policy, Forsberg drafted a document called ‘Strategy for a Concerted National Effort to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race’. The strategy was based on the premise that the idea of a nuclear freeze was insufficient in itself to convince policymakers. Instead, only a popular movement based on grassroots activism could create sufficient political momentum for a change in policy. After some success in obtaining Congressional support, the movement became disenchanted and dispirited by the fact that Congressmen who voted for a nuclear freeze resolution in May 1983 also voted shortly thereafter to fund the MX missile.
The movement also encountered increasingly effective resistance from the Reagan administration which viewed the rapid growth of the freeze movement as a threat to its nuclear modernization program and sought ways to undermine it. Among the means it employed was to launch its own ‘peace offensive’, transforming Reagan’s image into that of a ‘peacemaker’ and highlighting his own concern about nuclear war. In this sense, by 1983–1984, the freeze movement had some indirect impact on Reagan’s rhetoric, which was no longer as confrontational as it had been in the early days of his administration.22
The question now before the human species … is whether life or death will prevail on earth…. One might say that after billions of years nature, by creating a species equipped with reason and will, turned its fate, which had previously been decided by the slow, unconscious movements of natural evolution, over to the conscious decisions of just one of its species…. Thought and will become mightier than the earth that had given birth to them.23
This focus on the impact of nuclear war on the planet as a whole fitted in with the developing environmental movement, reflecting growing concern about the impact of human activities on the world’s ecology. ‘Environmental science’ was one of those areas of research that had developed with the nuclear age. It was rooted in military attempts to understand the conditions in which nuclear weapons might be used. The importance of climate conditions had become apparent early on. ‘Fallout’, a word first coined in 1950 in the landmark study of The Effects of Atomic Weapons, had been considered as a key measure of the force of nuclear explosions but it involved too many uncertainties, especially the weather, which is why the focus was on blast radius instead. The campaign in the 1950s against nuclear tests was prompted by fears of pollution. Studies undertaken for the US government demonstrated that atmospheric tests had indeed damaged the ozone layer and that once these had been banned in 1963 the ozone layer had begun to heal. Schell’s view that nuclear detonations could lead to the extinction of human life drew on its likely impact on the stratospheric ozone, although this was one concern that was easing by early 1982, because individual weapons were now smaller. Instead the focus shifted to the effects of smoke absorbing sunlight. In 1975 the National Academy of Sciences, in a report commissioned by the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, concluded that there was a risk of the world becoming colder if sunlight was blocked.24
At the start of the 1980s research was showing how dramatic changes in the climate could affect all life, whether from the dust generated by volcanic eruptions, asteroids hitting the earth or smoke from nuclear explosions. A team led by the astronomer Carl Sagan charted the temperature drops that would follow various levels of nuclear war, adding to previous studies by taking into account the consequences of cities being hit. They concluded that airborne dust, smoke and soot would cause drops in temperature by 15–25 degrees centigrade. This could happen with 100 megatons worth of explosions, a small proportion of the total available. Sagan began to spread his findings for purposes of both peer review and wider publicity. Sagan’s analysis was controversial. He was avowedly partisan, having written parts of President Carter’s valedictory address, and was a talented publicist. The findings of his team first appeared in a newspaper supplement in October 1983, even though submissions had also been made to peer-review journals.25 The term ‘nuclear winter’ was coined by one of Sagan’s co-authors, Richard Turco, a scientist at a NASA research laboratory whose employer did not like to see words like ‘weapon’ and ‘war’ in published articles.26
His detractors accused him of playing down many uncertainties in his analysis, stressing the worst case though other less definitive outcomes were possible. He focused sharply on 100 megatons as the point at which the catastrophe would be triggered. A strategic analysis was therefore assumed rather than developed and justified. Sagan was regularly accused of going beyond his role as a scientist in drawing the policy conclusion that ‘deep cuts’ in nuclear arsenals were imperative. At the same time, many of his critics, such as Edward Teller, were scientists with very different political allegiances and were anxious to dismiss all analyses that undermined the credibility of US nuclear power.27 Although the policy implications of Sagan’s analysis were not too well hidden they were made explicit in a Foreign Affairs article in which he suggested that his findings would render traditional nuclear strategy obsolete. The prospect of ‘climactic catastrophe and cascading biological devastation’ had important implications for deterrence, especially ‘mutual assured destruction’ with its requirement for a secure second-strike capability. It might now be superseded by the notion of ‘assured self-destruction’ that would occur even without retaliation. In other words, US nuclear weapons would not only destroy the Soviet Union but also the United States. The nations of the Third World would be at risk even though they would have no part in the war. Moreover, civil defence preparations would be insufficient to account for the destroyed biological and agricultural environment that would impact the aggressor even with a militarily successful first strike. Sagan saw his analysis as making the case for deep cuts in nuclear arsenals, at least to get them below the especially lethal 100 megatons level.28 Along with many other scientists, Sagan was deeply opposed to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. The arguments over these issues, which saw the mingling of scientific analysis with political predispositions contributed to the politicisation of science. At this time scientific authority was used to challenge established policy positions. In due course other findings that might otherwise have been taken seriously were dismissed precisely because of an assumed policy agenda.29
For a short period, therefore, the implications of ‘nuclear winter’ seemed to portend the need for a fundamental rethinking of nuclear policy and strategy. In practice, however, the nuclear winter debate merely reinforced existing views. Though the Reagan administration initially tried to counter the scientific findings of the nuclear winter thesis, it was hard to dismiss completely the thrust of the analysis. At the same time, while this pushed the potential awfulness of nuclear war to its limits, well before those limits were reached the prospect seemed awful enough. That nuclear war was catastrophic was hardly news.
The official position remained to continue existing policies rather than to re-evaluate them. From the perspective of the administration ‘hawks’, the nuclear winter thesis reaffirmed the need for active defences to protect American cities from destruction, particularly as the most damaging environmental effects would result from an attack on cities. Also, rather than reduce the size of the nuclear arsenal, it was argued more accurate missiles with lower-yield nuclear warheads, or even non-nuclear strategic warheads, were needed. On the same reasoning this concern could justify counterforce targeting and limited nuclear options, and developing capabilities to control escalation and ensure a timely cessation of hostilities. Others suggested that the nuclear winter thesis implied the need for an improvement of NATO’s conventional defences, a ‘no cities’ nuclear targeting doctrine, and pursuing other measures to enhance crisis stability and reduce the possibility of accidents. This was a far cry from the more ‘dovish’ position about the need for rapid progress in arms control and disarmament. Maintaining a large nuclear arsenal was seen as self-defeating whereas reducing to a ‘minimum sufficient deterrent’ of a few hundred weapons would serve as a more credible deterrent to a conventional attack and thus provide greater strategic stability. During the first half of the Reagan administration, ‘nuclear winter’ remained a prominent theme, but with the shift towards disarmament attention paid to this topic faded away.30
The sensitivity to the evils of nuclear war created a political climate of unease with dependence on nuclear weapons. This helped give an edge to the more narrowly focused policy debates. The most important focal point for those grappling with the moral dimension was the drafting of a pastoral letter on the subject by the American National Conference of Catholic Bishops. What was significant about the letter itself was that in seeking to reconcile nuclear deterrence with their ethical principles the bishops eventually concluded that it was permissible to own nuclear weapons for purposes of deterrence but improper to use them.31 The significance of the bishops’ pastoral letter was not in the quality of its reasoning or its conclusions but in throwing the fundamental dilemmas of nuclear policy into such stark relief. Elsewhere there was a strong national character to religious pronouncements. The Church of England eventually opted for a no-first-use position, following a debate stimulated by the publication of a working party report which was unilateralist in tone. The Catholic bishops of France, not surprisingly, concluded that nuclear deterrence was justified as an ‘ethic of distress’.32 The Russian Orthodox Church lacked a voice in Soviet times. When it acquired one after the end of the Cold War its instincts were patriotic. In November 2009 its head, Patriarch Kirill, stated that: ‘We must strive for a world without nuclear weapons but in a manner that does not hurt our country’.33
In the ensuing debate, the critics of the American bishops charged either that they had missed the higher moral necessity of opposing communism, or that they had missed the opportunity to endorse nuclear systems that were more in tune with the injunction of the just war theory to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.34 Others were less worried as to whether nuclear deterrence could be made to conform to timeless ethical principles and more concerned that a prudent policy was being followed.35
In long private conversations with successive Presidents—Kennedy and Johnson—I recommended, without qualification, that they never initiate, under any circumstances, the use of nuclear weapons.37
The more an earlier generation of policy-makers who had sustained the first-use commitment in the past described their own doubts as to its validity, the harder it was to accept the assurances of the current generation of policy-makers that the commitment was intact. Apart from the fact that a senior member of the Administration had written an impressive article sympathetic to ‘no first use’ just prior to the start of taking office,38 and that the Administration’s own statements in support of first use were couched in circumspect language, its failure to generate a compelling nuclear strategy reinforced rather than assuaged the doubts. In order to reassert orthodoxy there was a vigorous German response to the original ‘gang of four’, though they accepted that any nuclear use should be late rather than early.39 But as the decade progressed the German political consensus demonstrated considerable unease with the requirements of deterrence. A compelling case could still be made for flexible response,40 and its very ‘flexibility’ allowed for adjustments to new circumstances without great upheavals. In addition to the residual problem of the United States still needing to deter nuclear attacks on its non-nuclear allies, there was still no evidence that the decline in nuclear deterrence would be matched by a surge in conventional capabilities. The general sense was one of unease. It was difficult to get rid of the weapons and they did deter but the position was hardly comfortable.
In terms of the old orthodoxies this meant that Europe was becoming ‘safe for conventional war’, although this hackneyed warning reflected no tangible political developments on the continent. It was challenged by a series of analyses claiming that the conventional imbalance had been exaggerated.41 A cottage industry producing alternative military balances, normally based on a thorough trawl of all information officially and unofficially released from the executive branch, came to challenge the Administration’s position on the extent to which the United States had slipped behind the Soviet Union.42 Sovietologists deplored the caricatures of the Soviet Union and its policies and pleaded for a more sensitive appreciation of its character and behaviour.43 None of this cut much ice, at least not until late in the Administration when the contrary indicators were proving strong and it suited the Administration to refine its view.
More troublesome were studies demonstrating the problems likely to be faced when turning theory into practice. From the Schlesinger doctrine of 1974 onwards improvements in command, control, communications and surveillance systems had been central to claims that it was becoming possible to design and execute subtle nuclear tactics during a prolonged conflict. A number of studies questioned whether it would be at all feasible to undertake sophisticated and protracted nuclear operations, given the havoc wreaked upon communications in a nuclear environment.44 Paul Bracken in an original contribution to the debate warned that the interactions of the alert and command systems in a high-level nuclear crisis were imperfectly understood and could well be disastrous.45 This renewed interest in the nuances of nuclear operations was coupled with analyses based on studies of the origins of non-nuclear conflicts which stressed the impact of misperceptions, communication failures and the implementation of plans devised in peace-time, especially those based on speedy mobilization.46 Indeed to read some of the literature it was possible to doubt whether any diplomatic communications—let alone deterrent threats—were understood by those receiving them as they had been sent.47 Inevitably the most favoured case study was the outbreak of World War I.48
The literature offered a catalogue of all the many things that could possibly go wrong during attempts to manage crises, with the clear warning that they probably would go wrong in any conflict involving the nuclear powers. In terms of policy this suggested reducing the extent to which nuclear weapons could at all get caught up in a crisis or even a conventional war.
A second source of counter-attack, not surprising given the vigour of the challenge to the old orthodoxies of mutual assured destruction, came from the liberal old guard.49 They were concerned with the apparent reckless disregard of what they had previously taken to be self-evident. Robert McNamara, on retirement from the World Bank, took the arguments he had been developing as Secretary of Defense a stage further in making the case for a minimum deterrent. Another contribution came from one of his key aides of that period, Morton Halperin. Both argued that the impossibility of devising means of using nuclear weapons in a way that made any military sense undermined their overall value in security policies. As total abolition would not be possible the best course was to constrain their numbers, location and command procedures to reduce as much as possible the risk of accidental detonation. In this they were influenced by the studies on the problems of command and control in a nuclear environment.50
People regularly stand at the curb watching trucks, buses and cars hurtle past at speeds which guarantee injury and threaten death if they so much as attempt to cross against the traffic. They are absolutely deterred. But there is no fear. They just know better.51
His influence was still felt in many of the critiques of the Reagan Administration, perhaps most notably in Robert Jervis’s thorough dissection of the Reagan strategy, which he dedicated to ‘James King, Thomas Schelling, Glenn Snyder, and the memory of Bernard Brodie, who developed so many of the ideas I have used’. His analysis drew upon the notion of ‘the threat that leaves something to chance’ which he contrasted favourably with strategies based on Herman Kahn’s idea of ‘escalation dominance’.52 The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy soon became accepted as the most complete statement of the reasons for confidence rather than despair in nuclear deterrence.
As in the 1960s, the liberal critique started from the premise that the nuclear stalemate was a fact of life from which some benefit might be derived as a result of its sobering influence. The nagging question was always whether it would be possible to benefit from nuclear threats that one dare not implement. But with the passage of time mutual deterrence appeared less delicate than ever. There was no reason to believe that the threats would ever need to be implemented. All this suggested that deterrence was much easier than many assumed. Those who felt confident in this felt obliged to make the case against the anti-nuclear movement as well as the Reagan Administration.53
As long as each side has thermonuclear weapons that could be used against the opponent, even after the strongest possible preemptive attack, existential deterrence is strong and it rests on uncertainty about what could happen.54
With this concept of ‘existential deterrence’, the deterrent effect was almost wholly impervious to the location and capabilities of nuclear weapons, and the doctrines that would notionally govern their use. All that was required was the availability of some nuclear weapons that could be used in anger. In this way the most perplexing problems of nuclear policy were rendered virtually irrelevant. Forces were to be judged by essentially negative criteria: they should not be vulnerable, provocative, disruptive of arms control or prone to accidental detonation. So long as these criteria were met it did not matter what was procured, where and in what numbers it was deployed, and against what it was targeted.55 Thus the answer to the question, ‘What do we do if deterrence fails?’ was that the question could be ignored, because even without a satisfactory answer there was no reason to believe that deterrence would fail.