The American debate at the start of the decade was over what might be read into the offensive character of Soviet military doctrine.1 Analysis suggested that Soviet strategy in a major European war would involve a conventional stage, during which one of the priority tasks for conventional forces would be to attack and destroy as much of NATO’s nuclear assets as possible,2 followed by nuclear strikes to remove surviving nuclear assets and then destroy major sources of conventional strength; and then lastly a mopping-up stage when conventional forces would remove remaining sources of resistance and occupy enemy territory. This envisaged that Warsaw Pact forces would take the nuclear offensive not as NATO anticipated, as a desperate act of last resort, but as a deliberate step towards victory.3 For this strategy to succeed the Soviet Union had to be able to maintain the initiative by being able to pre-empt a NATO nuclear strike at the first sign of its preparation, and doing so without NATO realising what was going on until it had lost most of its nuclear assets. All this assumed that Soviet territory would be respected as a sanctuary. This in turn depended on NATO (especially the United States) respecting this sanctuary status, presumably in return for its own territory being respected as a sanctuary.
It was reasonable to assume that in the event of nuclear war the Soviet Union would share the American interest in keeping the exchanges as limited as possible. However this did not mean that the two countries shared the same concept of limitations. A substantial counterforce exchange between the super-powers directed against missile silos, command and control centres and submarine pens, might be characterized by the United States as being limited in the sense of focusing on one set of targets to the exclusion of others, yet to the Soviet Union this would appear as the most logical form of attack—the essence of strategic warfare.4 Given the proximity of key military targets to civilian areas the presumption would have to be that such attacks would be experienced as total. Soviet planners appear to have found it very difficult to envisage nuclear exchanges at the super-power level being at all limited in any useful sense of the word.
Soviet statements emphasized that any nuclear attacks on the homeland would not be deemed limited even if they were launched from European bases, were on a relatively small scale and related to the course of a land war in Europe. Defence Minister Marshal Ustinov was quite blunt in 1982: ‘There can be no kind of limited nuclear war at all.’5 The Soviet concept of limitations was about whether or not the territory of the super-powers was attacked. This was to be of a quite different order to the territory of allies. In 1972 the Soviet Union even proposed to the United States a treaty in which the two sides would pledge not to use nuclear weapons against each others’ homeland even if they were being used against the territory of their NATO and Warsaw Pact allies.6 The transformation from limited to total war would therefore take place when the first weapons exploded on Soviet territory. This ‘sanctuary’ concept informed much of the opposition to US cruise and Pershing missiles because they were theatre weapons intended to extend the war to Soviet territory, thus undermining any distinction between the theatre of operations and the homeland.
The objective is not to turn large economic and industrial regions into a heap of ruins (although great destruction is apparently unavoidable) but to deliver nuclear strikes which will destroy strategic combat means, paralyze enemy military production, making it incapable of satisfying the priority needs of the front and rear, and sharply reducing the enemy capability to conduct strikes.
Another described tactical nuclear engagements in terms of limited political objectives: ‘… they should not encompass objectives that would put into question the very existence of the opponent’s social system’.7
In the US and the ‘imperialist camp’ at large, the USSR faces a formidable adversary, whose real purposes are not disclosed by declaratory doctrinal positions—the reality in Soviet eyes lies in the US pursuit of war-waging counterforce capabilities with offensive strategic forces eminently capable of ‘first-strike’: the ‘punishment’ concept has given way to coercion and constraint, with counterforce capability growing constantly.9
Second, with the arrival of cruise and Pershing missiles the likelihood of Soviet territory being granted sanctuary status declined, and the chances of being able to fight a nuclear war that left Soviet territory virtually unscathed was reduced.10
These problems raised a question mark against the wisdom of using the initial conventional phase to prepare the ground for the nuclear phase, as a result of which some favourable opportunities in the conventional area might be lost. As a result, Soviet planners began to attach more importance to the conventional stage and would hope to achieve their basic objectives without resort to nuclear strikes. NATO would either be deterred from nuclear escalation or its nuclear facilities would be destroyed by conventional means. In this sense the shift in the Soviet position towards a no-first-use policy, however unreliable a guide it might have been to Soviet behaviour in the actual event of war, does seem to have had significance beyond its immediate propaganda value to the Soviet leadership.11 Now the main task of Soviet military thinking was to develop and enhance the conventional option.12
Even into the 1980s, the analogy of June 1941 remained central to Soviet attitudes about nuclear war. The longstanding fear of surprise attack was compounded by technological and strategic developments in the US, such as the highly accurate MX missile, the deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles to Europe, and the issuance of PD-59. Later, when the Cold War was over, it was claimed that SDI had the biggest impact on the Soviet leadership, but during the 1980s Pershing and cruise missiles were more likely to be described as a strategic threat to the USSR. They could destroy command posts and other key facilities within minutes. Despite the American claims that the Pershing II only had a range of 1800 km, Soviet leaders believed that the range was closer to 2500 km, thus being able to hit Moscow and ‘decapitate’ the Soviet leadership.13
In March 1983, shortly after referring to the Soviets as an ‘evil empire’, Reagan announced that the US would pursue SDI. This came just as the US was also about to deploy the Pershing II to West Germany. In response to Reagan’s vitriolic anti-Soviet rhetoric, the Soviets analogized Reagan to Hitler and questioned his sanity. Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov was particularly concerned about Reagan’s policies and feared they might lead to nuclear war. Since coming to office in 1981, Reagan had overtly and covertly shifted US policy to take a more confrontational stance. Among the covert actions taken was to conduct air and naval operations close to the Soviet border to probe their defences as if in preparation for war.14 When the Soviets shot down a Korean airliner (KAL 007) in September 1983 killing 269 people this reflected an increasingly paranoid state of mind as well as the clumsiness of their procedures (the pilot knew it was a civilian airliner yet feared a reprimand if he did not follow orders).
Under Brezhnev the idea of a Soviet ‘doomsday machine’ had taken shape. The answer to the problem of decapitation was to develop a retaliatory system that could function without the normal command structure. Originally it was to have the name ‘dead hand’ (Mertvaya Ruka, in Russian) which captures the idea of a system that could carry out the presumed intent of people who had just been killed. This would have been fully automated. The system built was called Perimeter. Unlike ‘Dead Hand’, as well as the ‘doomsday machine’ envisaged by Kahn, and present in Dr. Strangelove, this one was only ‘semi-automatic’ in that it would involve those officers who had survived in their protected command bunker still able to communicate to surviving nuclear systems. The biggest potential advantage of the system was that it would give the leadership some chance of waiting to make their decision on whether and what to launch. This should have avoided forcing the Soviet leadership into a panicked decision on the basis of unverified reports of incoming attacks. Instead they could check what had happened before deciding on the action to take. In this respect, it added to stability rather than detracted from it.
On 26 September 1983, when official anxiety had almost peaked, Stanislav Petrov was a lieutenant colonel at a new early warning station, known to be prone to malfunctions. All potentially relevant data from satellites watching for American missile launches was fed into a computer to check whether anything alarming picked up was in fact an attack. When the warning came that night, confirmed as being of high reliability, there was, if it was real, no time to check for glitches in the system. Instead Petrov checked the optical telescope on the grounds that an actual attack would soon show up. There was nothing there and he doubted that the Americans would have launched a single missile. So he told his superiors that this was a false alarm. The system then reported additional incoming missiles. Still he saw nothing. He stuck with his original judgment and fortunately he was right.15
not hide the fact that [its new missile systems] are actually intended for future wars. Hence the doctrines of ‘rational’ and ‘limited’ nuclear war; hence, the assertions about the possibility of surviving and winning a protracted nuclear conflict.16
prepared (for the first time since the Second World War) for a situation where our armed forces obtained reliable data of [an adversary’s] decision made by the highest military and political leadership to launch a surprise attack, using all possible firepower (artillery, aviation, etc.) against us. In response, we conducted offensive operations to disrupt the enemy attack and defeat its troops. That is, a preemptive strike.18
After ABLE ARCHER ended without incident, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Reagan were able to get an insight into high-level Soviet thinking based on the reports of a KGB officer working for the British, Oleg Gordievsky. Both leaders were apparently surprised to learn the extent of Soviet paranoia and modified their own policies to lessen the risks of an accidental nuclear war.19
This was Gorbachev’s inheritance when he came to power in 1985. In the years that followed, Soviet strategy would undergo a radical transformation as part of a wider transformation of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s attempt to institute reforms to save the Soviet Union was heavily dependent on reducing defence expenditure which had drained the civilian economy leaving it uncompetitive compared to the capitalist economies. And even with the heavy expenditures on defence in its attempt to maintain strategic ‘parity’, the Soviet Union was still falling further behind technologically, especially in areas such as high-precision munitions. By the mid-1980s with the economy and domestic living standards falling behind those of the West, sparking resentment at home, the Communist system had long since lost its appeal as a model for others. To reverse this trend and to improve the economy meant having to stop the arms race which would itself require ‘new thinking’ about the nature of Soviet security.
This dilemma had long been recognized but the lack of reformist leadership stifled any attempt at change. With Gorbachev in power, reformist ideas were finally embraced, though their implementation would prove difficult. This was evident with ideas for the reform of Soviet military doctrine—specifically with respect to how to fight a war with NATO. There were knock-on effects for the Soviet military system more generally, including its role in Eastern Europe. Another event that encouraged Gorbachev to pursue arms control was the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident that occurred in April 1986. On 26 April 1986 there were explosions at the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine. The response was slow and inadequate, with no proper plan in place or implemented to contain the fires or evacuate the local population. It took two days before an announcement was issued and information remained scarce for some time. Gorbachev responded to the crisis in traditional Soviet manner—denial and anger, and an effort to shift the blame to local officials and managers. Yet soon he realized that what had happened was an indictment of the system. With a radiation cloud passing over Europe it was impossible to pretend that nothing untoward had taken place. Trust had been lost in the nuclear establishment but also in nuclear weapons. Addressing the Soviet people on TV he said Chernobyl showed ‘what an abyss will open if nuclear war befalls mankind. For inherent in the nuclear arsenals stockpiled are thousands upon thousands of disasters far more horrible than the Chernobyl one.’ ‘In one moment,’ he told the Politburo on May 5, ‘we felt what a nuclear war is.’20 Several months later, his confidence in Soviet technology would be further undermined with an explosion aboard the Soviet nuclear submarine K-219.21 The Chernobyl accident also highlighted to Soviet military leaders that the devastation resulting from a strike on a nuclear power station by conventional cruise missiles would be the equivalent to that of a nuclear strike.22 Gorbachev’s recognition of the ecological dangers associated with nuclear weapons influenced his thinking, and picked up on some prominent themes in the American nuclear winter debate. He told Richard Nixon: ‘Even if one country would constantly be arming itself, and the other would do nothing, then this first country still would gain nothing. For the weak side may simply detonate all its nuclear devices, even on its own territory, and it would mean suicide for it and a slow killing for the adversary’.23
The key shift in Soviet military doctrine that would have important repercussions was adopting the idea of ‘non-offensive defence’. Developed mainly by Western peace researchers, such as Anders Boserup, Horst Afheldt, and Albrecht von Müller, ‘non-offensive defence’ aimed to increase stability, especially in times of crisis, by making military systems structurally unable to launch offensive operations. For Boserup, stability derived not from equal forces but the superiority of defensive over offensive means. Reducing numbers was deemed insufficient if the military structures were still designed for offense. It was essential to make changes in conventional force structures to include major reductions in tanks, river crossing units, strike aircraft, and other military equipment necessary for pre-emptive strikes and large-scale offensive operations. If the prospect of conventional war was significantly reduced, this would then eliminate the need to maintain large arsenals of tactical nuclear weapons. Moreover, as the most common scenario for East-West nuclear conflict was of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe escalating to tactical and then strategic nuclear use, downgrading the prospect of a Soviet invasion would also reduce these consequential risks. In essence, to achieve a mutual increase in security, a disproportionate amount of Soviet cuts was necessary.24
… if a war were unleashed against the USSR and its allies, their armed forces should have the capability necessary for crushing the enemy, primarily including the waging of resolute offensive operations at all levels of the conflict. The greater the capacity for such operations the stronger the defense, the more reliable the deterrence of hostile actions of the other side, and the better the conditions for the maintenance of peace.
If the military potential exceeds limits of reasonable sufficiency for defense, it will inevitably be perceived by other countries as a sign of aggressive intentions, outweighing any political obligations and statements. Such a situation causes distrust and suspicion, and generates political tension in relations between states, which, in some unforeseen crisis, could turn into an uncontrollable military conflict.27
According to the reasoning of Arbatov and his colleagues, if war could not be won then it must be prevented, and if it was to be prevented the greater priority would have to be given to eliminating the risk of aggravating a crisis in the first place rather than preparing to deliver ‘a crushing blow to an aggressor’. Arbatov applied this to both conventional and nuclear doctrine.
The new reformist security concepts were announced as Soviet policy at the 27th party congress in 1986. In his speech, Gorbachev referred to ‘mutual security’, stressing ‘reasonable sufficiency’ as the new criterion for Soviet military expenditure instead of attempting to match the adversary in all respects.28 Soviet security would be recognized as a political task rather than being driven by military-technical concerns.29 The concept of ‘reasonable sufficiency’ was also discussed at the Warsaw Pact’s Political Consultative Committee in Budapest in 1986, and formalized a year later in Berlin as Warsaw Pact doctrine. At Budapest it was proposed to reduce military forces to a level where neither the Warsaw Pact nor NATO would be able to launch a surprise attack as part of a general offensive. For the Soviet military the new doctrine meant that its standard scenario—in which NATO invaded Warsaw Pact territory and was then repulsed followed by Warsaw Pact forces advancing into Western Europe—had to be replaced with one in which the counter-attack did not involve capturing NATO territory. In a speech to the UN in December 1988, Gorbachev announced a unilateral reduction of Soviet forces by 500,000 men, 10,000 tanks 8500 artillery pieces and 800 combat aircraft. This included a unilateral withdrawal of 50,000 troops and 5300 tanks from Central and Eastern Europe. These withdrawals would not only have a military impact on the East-West balance, but would also further undermine Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. These significant cuts were not universally applauded within the Soviet system. Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev, Chief of the Soviet General Staff, considered the new doctrine to be ditching ‘a substantial segment of our military experience, theory and practice’. Just after Reykjavik he spoke to an audience drawn from the national security elite, explaining that the Soviet Union was now ‘prepared to dismantle the mechanism of military confrontation with the United States and NATO in Europe’ and now stood for the ‘complete liquidation of nuclear weapons in the world. Instead of striving for parity, he said, the Soviet Union would reduce its forces, either by agreement or unilaterally if necessary’. He later recalled that while he was speaking, ‘there was absolute silence in the hall’, with faces reflecting ‘incomprehension, bewilderment and alarm’. When he was finished, ‘all restraints broke loose’ and he faced anger and accusations of treason.30
Once ‘reasonable sufficiency’ became Soviet policy, different constituencies of policymakers and bureaucrats sought to define it in ways that conflicted with one another. The conservative interpretation held that the new doctrine represented continuity rather than change. They argued that Soviet doctrine had always been defensive and that military requirements were determined by the US/NATO threat and maintaining the ability to deliver a knock-out blow. Moderates supported the force level reductions so long as they were mutual, but were reluctant to abandon the sorts of forces needed to launch offensive operations. The reformers pushed for more fundamental changes in Soviet doctrine and military structures, arguing for abandoning the offensive in favour of the defensive. They also pushed for greater reductions in conventional arms to the extent that these reductions would be unilateral.31 By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the military reforms initiated by Gorbachev were still in their early stages of implementation, but perhaps more important than the lack of speed was the general direction Soviet policy had taken. Short of a major change in the Soviet leadership, this direction appeared irreversible.
There was a parallel development in arms control policies. Gorbachev offered a schedule for complete nuclear disarmament in a speech on 15 January 1986, which in terms of vision provided his equivalent to Reagan’s ‘star wars’ speech of March 1983. As with SDI, it was hard to take seriously the ultimate goal. However, in this case the first steps were practical. Gorbachev no longer resisted intrusive verification as a cover for espionage, thereby easing the negotiating path considerably. The most cynical Western interpretation was that this was an attempt to create the conditions in which a conventional strategy could work. However, others saw signs of a growing Soviet conviction that there was nothing to be gained militarily in a nuclear exchange and that it was hopeless to pretend any more that socialism could triumph in these conditions.32 Moreover they reflected a clear policy choice. Gorbachev had been told that the most effective responses to SDI, beyond the obvious ruses of decoys and chaff, or measures to blind satellites, was simply to build more missiles with more warheads. The huge SS-18 ICBMs could each carry as many as 40 warheads—some 12,000 warheads for 308 missiles. But this would move the Soviet arsenal in exactly the opposite direction to the one he wanted to take it, and so Gorbachev closed this project down.33
Towards the end of the year, in a remarkable and hastily arranged summit in Reykjavik in Iceland, the two leaders appeared ready not only to take the first steps along the road to Gorbachev’s vision but to travel the distance. In a set of extraordinary discussions the two began to outbid each other in their utopianism. Their bureaucracies were spared the traumas of having to implement this by Reagan’s refusal to swap his vision of strategic defences in exchange for Gorbachev’s vision of complete disarmament.34
Among the NATO establishment in Europe there was a stunned astonishment that Reagan had been prepared to compromise nuclear deterrence in so cavalier a fashion. Ideas raised by the American team, such as the abolition of all ballistic missiles with a return to manned bombers as the main means of nuclear delivery, appeared to have been barely thought through. European leaders, such as Margaret Thatcher of Britain, urged a more cautious approach. Nuclear disarmament had long provided a stock of diplomatic pieties for forty years. What was striking about the new Reagan-Gorbachev relationship was an apparent shared interest in taking these pieties seriously. Many who had been known to utter these pieties themselves, especially in the national security establishments of Western Europe, remained more comfortable with the orthodoxies of NATO strategy. Their satisfaction with the status quo turned into a reluctance to tamper with one of its main pillars—nuclear deterrence. They considered it paradoxical and unwelcome that one of the consequences of improved East-West relations should be a readiness to eliminate the very condition that made it possible. The Administration’s interest in radical disarmament was not made any more tolerable by the fact that it appeared as an over-correction to the equally exaggerated doctrines that governed the rearmament of the Administration’s first years.
It was only after Reykjavik that Gorbachev’s view of SDI evolved from one of hostility to a more calm and mature understanding of the technological dynamics of both the proposed American system and the abilities to counter it. At Reykjavik, SDI had been the sticking point in negotiations as Reagan was unwilling to abandon it, not even for the future of a nuclear-free world. In contrast, Gorbachev insisted that blocking SDI was a central Soviet policy aim and that any nuclear arms reductions were conditional on progress in this area. Gorbachev left Reykjavik infuriated, privately referring to Reagan as ‘a representative of our class enemy, who exhibited extreme primitivism, a caveman outlook, and intellectual impotence’. But Gorbachev did not limit himself to blaming Reagan. As he also observed, ‘As soon as we would begin to go down to big issues, Reagan at once would refer to the need to consulting with experts. And the experts who accompanied him to Reykjavik were primarily representatives of the right reactionary forces’.35
The failure at Reykjavik left only one option for negotiations to proceed—Gorbachev would have to reverse Soviet policy and de-couple SDI from arms control. He was urged to do so largely on the grounds that attempting to build a Soviet version of SDI was too costly, and in any event, Soviet countermeasures were a cheaper and more effective alternative.36 Gorbachev was told by Sakharov that SDI was a ‘Maginot Line in space’ and that it would never be effective against the Soviet missile threat. In February 1987 Soviet policy changed. Opposition to SDI was no longer the priority.
This facilitated the signing of the INF Treaty at the Washington summit in December 1987. Gorbachev realised that the opposition to the zero option which made sense when it could not be sure that the NATO deployments would go ahead made less sense once deployment had begun. The option now offered the Soviet Union an opportunity to trade missiles which could only hit the allies of the United States for weapons that could actually hit the Soviet Union. With the INF Treaty in place, the Soviet fear of a decapitation strike from the Pershing II’s—a weapon Gorbachev referred to as a ‘gun pressed to our temple’37—that had pervaded Soviet thinking since the late 1970s, was now gone. The removal of the SS-20s, however, also removed the nuclear umbrella that would have been central to any Soviet offensive into Western Europe. Of particular concern for Soviet military strategists was not just the lack of intermediate range missiles but Gorbachev’s unilateral decision to remove Soviet short-range missiles as well. To justify to his own hardliners why he was making these unilateral concessions, Gorbachev argued that they were necessary to force the US into the disarmament process as they would otherwise be unwilling due to the stranglehold of the ‘military-industrial complex’ which merely wished to retain the status quo.38 To achieve a fundamental transformation of US-Soviet relations it was therefore deemed necessary to make significant unilateral cuts, as with short-range missiles.
…the most important task is to prevent a new round of arms race … first and foremost it will lead to a wearing out of our economy. This is impermissible. That is why it is impermissible to cling to particulars, to details, to fail to see the bigger picture behind the details, to confuse one’s own head with arguments over details … If they impose a second round of arms race upon us, we’ll lose!39
With a sufficient improvement in relations and by reassuring the West of the defensive intentions of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev argued that Reagan’s domestic support for the defence buildup and SDI would evaporate, forcing the Americans to place limits on, or to abandon it.40