The Cold War ended not with a terrible nuclear bang but with a whimper. The Soviet system collapsed. The arms race with the United States was a contributory factor. The American technological advantage had convinced many in the Soviet military that urgent measures were necessary to ensure that they were not left behind, and that this might require reform of the whole economy. Mikhail Gorbachev himself, who, unusually for the Soviet Union, had no association with the security apparatus, was appalled by the extraordinary burden of the military establishment. Only as the system became subject to a far more searching audit than had been possible during Brezhnev’s time did it become apparent that defence accounted for some 25% of the economy. This created an incentive to find ways of defusing tension so that resources could be diverted into more productive areas.
But Gorbachev’s main problem was that legitimacy had been draining away from state socialism for decades. Here the competition from the West that really mattered was its freedom and prosperity, increasingly contrasted with the greyness of life under communism. Gorbachev believed that the communist system could regain legitimacy and thus survive if it embraced democracy and modernised, but there was so little legitimacy left and so much modernisation to be accomplished that survival was impossible. As his reforms developed a momentum of their own, including an evident reluctance to employ the established means of Soviet terror, the system fell apart before reconstruction had a chance. Gorbachev embarked upon a programme of reconstruction (Perestroika) and openness (Glasnost).1 Western leaders watched sympathetically, wondering if the ‘Gorbachev effect’ would turn out to be anything more than surface-deep, and then possibly be reversed as the old guard fought back. Some queried whether they really wanted the Soviet Union to be turned into a dynamic, modern economy. They looked for evidence of a relaxation in the fundamentals of Soviet power in the post-war world—the pervasive influence of the Communist Party, the close control of Eastern Europe and predominant military power around the periphery of the USSR. Soviet forces left Afghanistan without quelling the rebels and with their reputation tarnished. Warsaw Pact countries that had already begun to test the limits of Soviet tolerance became more adventurous and less fearful of a repressive response. During the critical year of 1989 Poland saw the entry of non-communists into government, Hungary opening its border with Austria and, then, in November, the most symbolic single moment of the changing times, the breach in the Berlin Wall. Soon European communism was in full retreat.
In December Gorbachev met with Reagan’s successor and former Vice President, George H.W. Bush, at a summit meeting off the coast of Malta. Only the sea was stormy: political relations were calmer than ever. The end of the Cold War was proclaimed. It had lasted, quipped Gorbachev’s spokesman, ‘from Yalta to Malta.’2 The next year was taken up with the business of German unification, arms control and institutional reconstruction and the unexpected challenge posed by Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait. By the end of 1991 the rout was complete. Following a failed August coup against Gorbachev the Communist Party of the Soviet Union gave up its vanguard role and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics split up into 15 parts. The threat was no more. The Warsaw Pact disintegrated with the Soviet Union and the rump Russia began to confront chronic problems of economic decline and social stress.
NATO’s last great nuclear debate of the Cold War concerned short-range systems.3 The debate reflected the general dissatisfaction with flexible response, which was one legacy of the anti-nuclear protest movements of the early 1980s.4 In addition the December 1987 INF Treaty eliminated all land-based missiles between the ranges of 500 and 5500 kilometres. Although the great majority of the weapons to be removed were Soviet, if anything the strategic problem for NATO appeared greater. The alliance depended on nuclear threats and the anticipated path of escalation from the battlefield up to superpower strategic exchanges. NATO Governments had never been comfortable with the military case for those short-range systems left: part of the rationale for the original INF deployments was that they would create the conditions for a shift in the NATO force structure away from the short to the longer range. Now only short-range systems were permitted and NATO commanders wanted them modernised, with the main priority a follow on to the Lance (400–450 km) missile.
The West German Government was unhappy with such proposals, observing that short-range nuclear weapons if launched from targets in one Germany were most likely to hit targets in the other, raising the spectre of a nuclear war confined to the two Germanys but leaving the rest of Europe intact. This was compounded by the equally evident desire in Bonn to reinforce the improvements in East-West relations that were already in train. Elsewhere in NATO, and especially in Britain, there was little support for German proposals for a ‘third zero’, and irritation with the view that as a result of the INF Treaty somehow only Germans were at risk. In addition, the fact that the Soviet Union obviously favoured the third zero option reinforced the disinclination to take it seriously.
New negotiations were getting underway on conventional forces in Europe and it was tempting to argue that future nuclear disarmament must wait on their progress, but this stance went to the core of all the problems in NATO’s nuclear strategy. Suppose that, unlike the previous effort, the new talks did result in an agreed conventional symmetry between the two alliances. Would that mean that NATO could dispense with nuclear deterrence, which had always been justified by reference to the alliance’s conventional inferiority? While confidence in conventional forces might undermine the importance of the first use threat it did not remove the case for a second-use threat. Furthermore the conventional talks were likely to affect nuclear options as aircraft and missiles could deliver both nuclear and conventional munitions.
These were the arguments leading up to the May 1989 NATO summit, as difficult as any in the alliance’s history, as the British pressed for forceful language on nuclear deterrence and the need for ground-based systems which the Germans had no intention of deploying. It was decided to allow development work on the Lance replacement but leave deployment decisions until 1992, which could then be taken ‘in the light of overall security developments’ which at the time was assumed to mean arms control.5 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made clear that she did not expect much change by then. Negotiations would proceed at the glacial pace now assumed to be natural for arms control. ‘I think it’s a little bit optimistic’, she observed, continuing ‘It’s quite optimistic. It’s very optimistic’.6
Within months ‘overall security developments’ had completely undermined the case for any new missiles. By March 1990 German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was observing how their proposed range would be sufficient to hit NATO’s new friends in Prague, Warsaw and Budapest. Three weeks earlier, he reported, he had been in Rostock in East Germany, which was within range. ‘I spoke to 120,000 people. What would they have said if I had told them: “I’m going to order the nuclear missiles which will land on your heads”? They would have said “You’re Crazy.”’7 Soon even Mrs. Thatcher had to acknowledge that established positions might need adjustment. In April 1990 Bush announced that he had decided to ‘terminate the follow-on to the Lance program and cancel any further modernisation of US nuclear artillery shells deployed in Europe,’ and the next month he declared a readiness to enter into negotiations on the reduction of short-range nuclear forces in new talks.
These will continue to fulfil an essential role in the overall strategy of the Alliance to prevent war by ensuring that there are no circumstances in which nuclear retaliation in response to military action might be discounted. However, in the transformed Europe, they will be able to adopt a new NATO strategy making nuclear forces truly weapons of last resort.
Nuclear weapons make a unique contribution in rendering the risks of any aggression incalculable and unacceptable. Thus, they remain essential to preserve peace. …The fundamental purpose of the nuclear forces of the Allies is political: to preserve peace and prevent coercion and any kind of war. They will continue to fulfill an essential role by ensuring uncertainty in the mind of any aggressor about the nature of the Allies’ response to military aggression. They demonstrate that aggression of any kind is not a rational option.10
The alliance consensus thus gravitated towards acknowledging some role for nuclear deterrence, while accepting an orderly reduction in agreed force levels. Political change, however, continued to outpace the move in official thinking. After the failed communist coup in Moscow of August 1991, the spectre of the break-up of the Soviet Union loomed large. An agreement was needed to get a grip on the Soviet nuclear arsenal before one could possibly emerge from a negotiating process. Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s National Security Advisor, later explained that in principle he did not mind the fragmentation of the Soviet arsenal, as that would reduce the size of any attack that could be mounted against the United States. The ‘erosion of the center’s authority, however, posed some security dangers to be considered, especially the loss of physical control of the country’s weapons of mass destruction.’11 In a televised speech on 27 September 1991 Bush announced that while with strategic weapons he was looking forward to new, and more radical, negotiated reductions, with ‘tactical’ weapons he was prepared to forego new negotiations and work through reciprocated measures to eliminate tactical nuclear weapons. He cancelled all new development programmes, and also promised to withdraw all nuclear warheads at sea as well as artillery shells. Bombers were taken off alert. He was soon followed by Gorbachev who, on 5 October, announced a number of similar measures. Soon NATO agreed that the US would hold only 700 nuclear warheads in Europe by the mid-1990s. The time when there was a nuclear equivalent to almost all conventional munitions was over. This was all accomplished with minimal debate. Also in October 1992 Bush halted nuclear testing and announced a unilateral moratorium. This was extended by Clinton the next July, who encouraged negotiations on a comprehensive test ban. The negotiations were completed successfully in September 1996, although in October 1999 the Senate refused to ratify the Treaty.12
Moving quickly had the desired effect. In December 1991 the Russian Federation and the three quasi-nuclear states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus in the new Commonwealth of Independent States agreed to move all tactical nuclear warheads to central factory premises by 1 July 1992.13 Until the last months of the Cold War the alliance had worried about how to sustain some deterrent capacity in the face of Soviet disarmament proposals: soon the issue became one of creating the conditions for as rapid as possible Soviet/Russian disarmament. In the end the elimination of short-range nuclear weapons was too important and urgent to be left to arms control.
Strategic nuclear weapons were handled in a more traditional manner. START I, signed on 31 July 1991, reduced the number of delivery vehicles to 1600, the ‘accountable’ deployed strategic nuclear warheads for each side from 13,000 to 6000 warheads, of which at most 4900 could be on ballistic missiles. To deal with the problems caused by the break-up of the Soviet Union, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan were included in protocols to START I, signed in May 1992, in which they agreed to abandon their acquired nuclear status as soon as possible.
By the time the US Senate and the Russian Duma had ratified the Treaty, Bush and Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the new Russian Federation, agreed on a ‘joint understanding’ that would get the numbers of deployed nuclear warheads going down to 3000–3500 in 2003, of which there would be a maximum of 1750 on SLBMS, and would see the elimination of MIRVed ICBMs, and in particular the big beasts of the Cold War years, the US MX and the Russian SS-18. Moscow found that decommissioning missiles to meet arms control obligations was a slow and expensive process. It would have even more trouble replacing the more obsolescent parts of their arsenal on a one-to-one basis. This meant that whatever nuclear deterrent they sought would have to be maintained at lower numbers, and this reinforced the interest in strategic arms reductions with the United States.14 Nonetheless, the process of ratification of START II, which the US Senate managed in January 1996, was regularly delayed as Russian Parliamentarians took umbrage at some aspect of western behaviour, as often as not having no relevance to the nuclear relationship. Hardliners, intensely suspicious of western intentions, warned that the old enemy would soon turn its attention to Russia which had been enfeebled as a result of Gorbachev’s folly. It took until April 2000 before the Treaty passed the Russian Duma.
The end of the Cold War posed unavoidable questions of whether the force structures and doctrines of the Cold War had now become obsolete and should be dismantled. The case for NATO doggedly reserving the right to initiate nuclear war had been based to a large measure on the presumption of conventional inferiority vis-à-vis the Warsaw Pact. With the abrupt shift in the conventional balance in favour of NATO it might seem logical to suppose that there was no longer a need to sustain the first use option. George Quester observed that ‘Whoever has the advantage in conventional forces should be against nuclear escalation.’15 One of the past drivers of western nuclear strategy—the need to develop credible systems, doctrines and tactics with which to escalate—ceased to be a problem. Nuclear munitions had once been judged essential if a range of critical military tasks were to be accomplished. Now not only was there no longer any need to worry about the quantitative advantage of the Warsaw Pact, but also the new generation of lethal conventional weapons could devastate large force concentrations, and shatter hardened targets. Nuclear weapons were required neither to compensate for weaknesses in conventional forces, nor to intimidate non-nuclear powers. Only threatened nuclear use by another nuclear power seemed a proper subject for deterrence.
Another key driver seemed to be less pressing but could not yet be deemed immaterial. If it was the case that there was still a requirement to maintain deterrence against nuclear threats, then this would still need to be extended to allies. If, in response to the happier circumstances of the early 1990s, the established force structures were dismantled then, should the security situation deteriorate, a sudden demand for nuclear deterrence could be expected to re-emerge. There would then be a need for a ‘reconstitution’ policy to reinforce nuclear guarantees in an emergency.16 Yet once the weapons had been removed would it be possible to give them a revived role without aggravating the crisis that had occasioned the re-appraisal? Bringing weapons out of store, putting others back on alert, coyness about deployment and targeting plans would appear provocative. Robert Art observed that ‘the requirements of extended deterrence still tug the United States away from a minimum force; those of nuclear de-emphasis towards it.’17
There were still echoes of the old description of NATO as keeping the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.18 One claim in favour of the US nuclear commitment to NATO was that this reduced the incentives to proliferate in an area full of countries with a great power past, notably Germany. The suggestion that without the US nuclear guarantee there would be a greater probability that the Germans would develop a national nuclear arsenal was deployed in the US as an argument for maintaining the guarantee, even though in practice it was in Germany that anti-nuclear sentiment was at its most intense. ‘So long as there is a reluctance to see German nuclear weapons’, observed Walter Slocombe, ‘there will be a strong case for an American nuclear guarantee made manifest by the presence of nuclear weapons nearby’.19 So there remained a geopolitical rationale for a nuclear presence of sorts, if only to signal than there had been no diminution in the overall US strategic commitment to Europe.20 There also remained little confidence in almost all alternative security arrangements, including those dependent upon the British and French forces.21 Indeed the European Union only was able to develop a serious defence identity by keeping this as non-nuclear and generally low-level in its ambitions as possible.
Lastly, a residual nuclear arsenal had some value ‘just in case’. ‘Circus acrobats eventually grow so accomplished that they can soar through their daring routines without a net’, observed Richard Ullman, but ‘that is no reason for taking the net away’.22 It could be argued also that the continued existence of nuclear weapons provided a reminder of the dangers of total war. Even without an authoritative specification of the chain of events which might end in nuclear war the thought that ‘it just might’, could introduce an immediate element of caution into any developing conflict. This could he described as ‘existential deterrence—minus’.