© The Author(s) 2019
Lawrence Freedman and Jeffrey MichaelsThe Evolution of Nuclear Strategyhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_4

4. Aggression and Retaliation

Lawrence Freedman1   and Jeffrey Michaels2  
(1)
Department of War Studies, King’s College London, London, UK
(2)
Department of Defence Studies, King’s College London, London, UK
 
 
Lawrence Freedman (Corresponding author)
 
Jeffrey Michaels

In order to understand the development of post-war strategic thought it is necessary to recognize the deep-rooted nature of the belief in the inevitability of a massive surprise attack as the opening shot in any war. It was particularly strong in the US, because of the experience of Pearl Harbor, but was widely accepted in Europe. The Soviet view was complicated by the fact that they had been the victim of a massive surprise attack in 1941 but largely as a result of Stalin’s refusal to pay heed to the warnings that had been sent to him. The focus on surprise attacks reflected not only the tactical value of surprise as a way of beating strong defences, but also a presumption that this was the way of aggressors.

In the nineteenth century ‘aggression’ was a limited, technical, and neutral term, referring to any ‘military attack by the forces of a state against the territory or vessels of another state’. War was still a legitimate, if regrettable, last resort in pursuit of legal rights. Any attempt to interfere with the status quo, to harass a nation’s subjects or upset its sense of honour could be used to justify a declaration of war. As the view of war changed so did the concept of aggression. By 1914 the term had become pejorative, referring to a military attack that was not justified by law. After 1918 it became hard to justify any use of military force. Illegitimate casus belli came to include not only attempts at conquest but even redress of legitimate grievances. In such declarations as the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 war was renounced as an ‘instrument of national policy’. Short of self-defence and collective actions sanctioned by the League of Nations, there could be no just recourse to war, whatever the provocation. Any recourse would be ‘aggression’.1

This encouraged a shift away from viewing war as the result of a design fault in the international system, a consequence of the lack of any supreme authority capable of disciplining awkward states, but a moral failing at the heart of certain states that led them to seek to impose their will be force. ‘Our position’, explained the American prosecutor before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, ‘is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions’.2 Aggression was seen to be the most deviant form of international behaviour. It was deviant not only because it violated an international code of conduct, but also because it was patently foolish. As it inevitably led to disaster, it could never be an act of rational people of moral sensibility, who would use peaceful means to settle disputes.

The adoption of violent means betrayed more than an aggressor’s strategic calculus. It also betrayed something about the nature of its society. It was symptomatic of a particular culture, one that bred in profusion ‘authoritarian’ or ‘aggressive’ personalities, or else a ‘mass society’ that allowed an unsavoury and totalitarian political philosophy to prosper and gain control. Social scientists and psychologists, convinced of the essential irrationality of war, searched for its causes in the alienation of industrial man, patterns of child-rearing, the ambition of megalomaniacs, the dreams of political utopias, and the potency of unthinking nationalism, rather than such mundane things as geographical vulnerabilities, a sense of grievance, or straightforward conflicts of national interests.

The domestic causes of wars were as important as the structural. The most aggressive form of political system was the totalitarian, for it demanded order, thrived on hatred and lacked the checks and balance associated with liberal democracy. The Nazi regime in Germany was one example of a totalitarian state; the Soviet Union was another. Because the foreign policy of these states reflected their ideological dispositions as much as realist calculations of national interest they were also inherently subversive, urging supporters inside rival states to undermine them, posing the question for liberal democracies of how liberal could they dare to be when enemy agents were working for their overthrow. As the Soviet Union took over from Germany as the external enemy so communism took over from Nazism and Fascism as an ideology to be opposed internally. George Orwell based his novel 1984 in Britain to demonstrate that `the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.’3 Abbott Gleason describes the prevailing view in the Western democracies as they saw the Soviet Union as a natural successor to Nazi Germany. They were both:

dictatorships of a new and terrible kind, violent, ideologically inspired, endlessly aggressive, and possessed of extraordinary new technological means to dominate their helpless subjects utterly. They obliterated the distinction between public and private, which even the most brutal of the earlier dictatorships had respected. In a geopolitical sense, the Soviet threat was similar to the German threat and was its lineal successor.4

Thus aggression was not simply a matter of who fired the ‘first shot’ in a war and went on the offensive. The responsibility for this was not always clear or necessarily significant. There could be a case for pre-emptive action. Furthermore, because conflicts could be played out by non-military means there must be non-military forms of aggression. For this reason, but also because pejorative terms tend to be generalized to encompass all unwelcome acts, aggression eventually came to be ‘applied to any instrument of state policy which affects the interests of other states in a significant way’. It was now necessary to talk of ‘armed aggression’.5

Aggression was more than a military move to be met by a counter-move. It was a crime deserving of punishment. The perpetrators could not be expected to act as international statesmen, with whom it might be possible to negotiate and compromise. They could only be communicated with by force. The experience of the pre-war years underlined the danger of ‘appeasing’ an insatiable aggressor through continual concessions. ‘International blackmail’, based on the threat of aggression, could only be dealt with by firm resistance and preparation for a trial of strength. Reliance on the conventional panoply of diplomatic instruments could be counter-productive, for aggressors must never think you ‘soft’. Clark Clifford, Special Counsel to the President, wrote to Truman in 1946:

The language of military power is the only language which disciples of power politics understand. The United States must use that language in order that Soviet leaders will realize that our government is determined to uphold the interests of its citizens and the rights of small countries. Compromise and concessions are considered, by the Soviets, to be evidences of weakness and they are encouraged by our ‘retreats’ to make new and greater demands.6

Aggression did not invariably involve a surprise attack and making the first move might be a prudent response to anticipated aggression. It was nonetheless assumed that surprise attack was the way of aggressors. Starting a war meant seizing the initiative and the more the enemy was caught by surprise the more this initiative was likely to succeed. With the stakes so high the benefit of surprise would not be squandered for mere ‘tactical’ benefit; the gain would have to be of ‘strategic’ dimensions. The diplomatic niceties of ‘ultimatums’ and formal declarations of war could be ignored. Historical experience was less than conclusive on this matter. Both the Japanese and the Germans had used surprise attacks to weaken the conventional military position of their enemies, and neither had gone on to win their wars. The end result had been disastrous for both.7 In addition, neither Britain nor France entered the previous war as the victims of a surprise attack.

The most decisive ‘imaginable strategic’ act would be atomic bombardment. The aggressor would aim for an immediate paralysis of the victim’s socioeconomic organization rather than his military capabilities. Some even suspected that it would take guesswork to identify the aggressor. Again there were reasons for doubt. It was not clear why it would make sense to use weapons most suitable for attacking cities in this way. Such attacks would undoubtedly be shocking but they would still allow the adversary to fight back if its means of counter-attack were untouched. It should not have been hard to understand that maximum hurt to the victim was not the same as maximum gain to the attacker. Nevertheless the consensus on this score was almost overwhelming.

In the discussion amongst scientists connected with the Manhattan Project, the value of atomic bombs for use in a surprise attack was a major theme. Some of the earliest thoughts on the future military role of nuclear weapons were collected in a September 1944 Report entitled ‘Prospectus on Nucleonics’ by a committee of scientists headed by Zay Jeffries:

A nation, or even a political group, given the opportunity to start aggression by a sudden use of nuclear destruction devices, will be able to unleash a ‘blitzkrieg’ infinitely more terrifying than that of 1939–1940. A sudden blow of this kind might literally wipe out even the largest nation—or at least all its production centers and decide the issue on the first day of the war.8

These ideas appeared in the June 1945 Franck Report of nuclear scientists urging caution in the use of the first bomb: ‘In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor’.9 They were endorsed by H. D. Smyth, one of the Manhattan Project scientists, who prepared the account of the development of atom bombs for official publication immediately after the first use of the bombs. In his conclusion Smyth wrote:

A weapon has been developed that is potentially destructive beyond the wildest nightmares of the imagination; a weapon so ideally suited to sudden unannounced attack that a country’s major cities might be destroyed overnight by an ostensibly friendly power.10

Such a view soon became the conventional wisdom. Caryl Haskins called the atom bomb ‘An ideal weapon for aggressors’; with 10,000 bombs costing some $10 billion there would be the means to ‘eliminate a great nation’. Major George Fielding Eliot of the New York Herald Tribune wrote that the atom bomb sets aside ‘the old theories of attack and defense. It gives to the surprise attack the power to destroy utterly, without warning.’ Robert Oppenheimer described it as ‘A weapon of aggression, of surprise, and of terror.’ David Lilienthal, recording the conclusion of a January 1947 discussion at the Pentagon between top military and scientific leaders, said ‘Value of surprise increased with every increase in potency of weapons; with atomic bomb surprise achieves supreme value.’11

At the same time it was also supposed that the United States and other peaceful nations would be effectively constrained from making a surprise attack despite the military benefits that might accrue. Edward Mead Earle observed that the new weapons (atom bombs and rockets) would ‘put an enormous premium on the surprise attack, planned in secrecy and waged a outrance’. An open and democratic society would be incapable of such planning and, in any case, the populations of liberal democracies only became interested in military preparedness after the outbreak of war. Because of the increased value of the sudden and provoked ‘knockout blow’, ‘the peacefully inclined and the militarily careless’ were put at a disadvantage.12

To many, especially the scientists who had brought the bomb into the world, the introduction of atomic weapons into an unreformed international society would be a disaster. The very structure of the international system, with its sovereign nation states each capable of preparing for war, meant that self-restraint in the use of atomic weapons could not be guaranteed. The only solution would be to banish the bombs themselves. A stark choice was identified: either the creation of a strong international organization with powers to enforce universal pledges of atomic abstinence or else the bad habits of international politics would be perpetuated until they inevitably led to an orgy of mutual destruction. The choice was ‘One World or None’.13

There was a serious effort made to achieve a measure of international control over atomic energy. This failed because the question became mixed up with the general deterioration in East-West relations. Neither side could summon up enough trust in the other. The original plan, put together by David Lilienthal and Dean Acheson had some incentives for the Soviets to join, but the version taken to the UN by Bernard Baruch was unacceptable to Moscow because it denied them a veto over the implementation of the scheme.14 It is important to note that even if the American plan, to put the most sensitive nuclear facilities under the control of an International Development Authority, had been accepted it would not necessarily have precluded the use of atom bombs. According to one contemporary analysis, as the know-how now existed the start of a war would be the trigger for a return to production. In a war lasting at least a year there would be an opportunity to construct usable weapons. One analysis suggested that even with an international agreement in place prior to a war both sides would build up their forces and develop their facilities as much as possible without actually contravening the treaty. Available facilities would be seized on the outbreak of war, and, until they became operational, the main military activity would consist of trying to destroy the facilities and delivery vehicles of the other side.15

The choice facing the world was considered so stark that some argued for drastic measures to push recalcitrant nations towards sanity, even threatening them with atomic weapons. There were a number of calls made for a move against the Soviet Union, widely suspected of aggressive tendencies, before it had a chance to do the world any more damage. For example, the redoubtable Senator Brien McMahon: ‘I assert that for the first time in human history, the failure to agree to a sane, effective and righteous control of weapons of war constitutes in and of itself an act of aggression’.16 Similar reasoning led to a curious and notorious call in October 1946 for nuclear threats against the Soviet Union from the philosopher Bertrand Russell. After noting that a war in the near future would lead to American victory and then ‘to a world government under the hegemony of the United States’, a development he would ‘welcome with enthusiasm’, Russell called for the liberal democracies to pressure the Soviet Union into accepting an international government. ‘The only possible way’ to do this would be by ‘a mixture of cajolery and threat, making it plain to the Soviet authorities that refusal will entail disaster, while acceptance will not’.17

In the absence of international control, nations who wished to avoid atomic bombardment would have to rely on their own devices. The best way to deter the employment of atomic weapons by one state was to threaten counter-employment. There was nothing new in the notion that an enemy might be dissuaded from using a particularly obnoxious weapon by threats of reprisal in kind. It was fear of reprisals that encouraged restraint over the use of gas during World War II. Hopes for a similar neutralizing effect were expressed in connection with the bombing of cities and submarine attacks on merchantmen. Here there was disappointment but the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ concept was strong and could be found in official rationales for air-raids and V-weapon attacks. This was why a monopoly in a terror-weapon was considered a major advantage.

In each of these cases the reasoning was confined to threats of reprisals in kind against use of specified weapons. There was another argument, also of long standing, that the more awful war became, the less likely that nations would resort to it to settle their disputes. But, especially in 1945, there could be little confidence in either this general proposition or the more modest hope that mankind might be spared certain horrors because of a fear of reprisals. Thus when Prime Minister Clement Attlee wrote to President Truman on atomic energy issues in September 1945 he made the point that ‘The only deterrent is the possibility of the victim of such an attack being able to retort to the victor.’ He then went on to cast doubt on the efficacy of such a deterrent: ‘In many discussions on bombing in the days before the war it was demonstrated that the only answer to the bomber was the bomber. The war proved this to be correct. This obvious fact did not prevent bombing but resulted in the destruction of many great centres of civilization.’18

The logic of retaliation as the best deterrent to aggression was appreciated from the start but, as can be seen with Attlee, it was combined with a deep pessimism that ‘sooner or later’ these weapons would be used. In the September 1944 report of the Jeffries Committee of Manhattan Project scientists it was noted that:

The most that an independent American nucleonic rearmament can achieve is the certainty that a sudden total devastation of New York or Chicago can be answered the next day by an even more extensive devastation of the cities of the aggressor, and the hope that the fear of such a retaliation will paralyze the aggressor.

But the Committee did not think ‘much of this hope’:

The whole history of mankind teaches that this is a very uncertain hope, and that accumulated weapons of destruction ‘go off’ sooner or later, even if this means a senseless mutual destruction.19

Similarly, in 1946, General Arnold offered his formula: ‘[O]ur first line of defense is the ability to retaliate even after receiving the hardest blow the enemy can deliver’. With such an ability a stalemate might be possible, but Arnold took pains to emphasize that this was only a possibility.20 As we shall see the key, and to many, a surprising feature of the nuclear age, was growing confidence that material destruction was not inevitable, neither sooner nor later.

The professional military readily accepted the importance of the threat of retaliation to deter atomic aggression. In Britain, due to the country’s size and vulnerability to strikes from Europe, the problem was seen as a defensive one from the start; an atomic stockpile was considered the only means of warding off Soviet aggression. As early as June 1945 UK scientists concluded that ‘the only answer to the bomb was to use it in retaliation’, and by October of that year the chiefs of staff were emphatic that the best means of defence would be ‘the possession of the means of retaliation’.21 The US Air Force, which was more interested in exploiting superiority than compensating for possible inferiority, tended to see the value of its bombers as a deterrent to all forms of aggression, atomic or otherwise. The expectation that the threat of overwhelming force would make potential aggressors pause before hasty actions was deeply ingrained into its thinking.

It was this form of general deterrence that the Policy Planning Staff of the US State Department had in mind when it discussed the need to maintain armed strength. Deterrence was of ‘outstanding importance’, in creating such an impression of military strength as to make it quite clear to the Russians that they would have no hope of victory in war. Already in 1948 there was a tendency to assume that ‘excessive military weakness here and in Western Europe might indeed create a factor which would operate to overcome the other reasons why the Soviet Government would not be inclined to use armed force, and might thus constitute a compelling invitation to aggression’.22 The fear that weak peacetime forces would cause an aggressor to miscalculate the resolve of democracies (once stirred to action) provided an argument for signalling determination via military preparedness. This need embraced all forces; it was not tied to a specific weapon or type of military action. It was to demonstrate a capacity for war-fighting and thus could not be seen as an alternative form of military posture that might reduce the need for traditional forms of armed forces.

In providing the required image, the atomic stockpile was of obvious importance. But the professionals did not feel they could rely on the threat of atomic retaliation to deter war or even atomic attacks directed against them. If an attack did come it was assumed that the enemy would exploit the advantages of surprise to the full. The restraining influence of an imposing atomic stockpile on others was no more than a considered but guarded hope.

What had yet to develop was a full doctrine of nuclear deterrence. The early development of such a doctrine stemmed from a critical examination of the assumption of inevitable surprise attack. This picked up on the tension in prevalent theories between an assumption of cities as the only appropriate targets and the decisive value of surprise. Unless the enemy’s means of nuclear retaliation were destroyed, little could be gained by surprise. In Britain, Liddell Hart and Blackett argued against the assumption that the aggressor would aim first for cities. Liddell Hart pointed out that aggressors tended to be calculating. ‘They plan to achieve their gains with the least possible damage both to themselves and to their acquisitions, whereas the victims of aggression are driven by an uncontrollable impulse to hit back regardless of the consequences.’ Therefore, he suggested, an aggressor aiming at no more than ‘profitable expansion … may hesitate to employ atomic bombs because of the likelihood of retaliation.’23

A similar point was made by Jacob Viner, an important influence on the coming generation of academic strategists. He declared himself unconvinced by the assumption that the atom bomb would give an overwhelming advantage to the surprise attack. Even after the victim’s cities had been destroyed ‘why can it not nevertheless retaliate within a few hours with as effective an atomic-bomb counter-attack as if it had made the first move’.24 Bernard Brodie also noted: ‘The element of surprise may be less important than is generally assumed. If retaliation has to be accepted no victory is worth it’. Brodie suggested that a stable balance in atomic arsenals might be safer than asymmetry: ‘A war in which atomic bombs are not used is more likely to occur if both sides have bombs in quantity from the beginning than if neither side has it at the outset or if only one side has it’. This same point was made by other contributors to The Absolute Weapon, the book Brodie edited, suggesting that the weapon was not as absolute as all that.25

One conclusion of this line of argument was that the only purpose of a surprise attack would be to destroy military facilities. In the light of later debates it is remarkable how little this point was explored at this time. One who did was a former bomber pilot, William Liscum Borden, who asked: ‘Why squander the precious assets of surprise and the initiative in attacking cities, a mission which can so easily be carried out later, when the main obstacle to a lightning victory is air forces-in-being?’. Assuming that ‘belligerents possess stockpiles of atom bombs and carriers numbered in the thousands’, Borden forecast a future war taking the form, in the first instance, of a:

one-dimensional aerial duel … between two highly decentralized military systems, each seeking to eliminate the offensive power of the other. If the war lasted long enough for industrial production to make itself felt, the belligerents most threatened could undertake the few brief raids necessary to paralyze his opponent’s home front; and retaliation in kind would surely follow.26

The general neglect of scenarios of this sort was surprising. The desirability of eliminating the enemy’s air offensive was, after all, an established tenet of the doctrine of strategic bombardment. If rockets were to play a major part in a future war then the best opportunity to destroy them would be on the ground, prior to launch. This neglect of the scenario may have reflected the natural obsession with what weapons of such ferocity could do to human beings. The most memorable use of airpower in World War II had been against cities and it was assumed that this pattern, confirmed at Hiroshima, was now established. Atom bombs were described habitually as ‘terror’ weapons with the term ‘weapons of mass destruction’ soon in use as a synonym, as if there were no other possible targets.27 In addition, and more practically, it was doubted that either side would be so foolish as to concentrate facilities for the production or carriage of atom bombs in a few places susceptible to attack.

Nevertheless, in the first tentative steps through the logic of deterrence, it did become apparent, at least to Bernard Brodie, that:

Thus far the chief purpose of a military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have no other useful purpose.

This became one of the most quoted early sentences about the strategic implications of the atomic bomb. Less quoted is the one which preceded it: ‘The first and most vital step in the American security program for the age of atomic bombs is to take measures to guarantee ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind.’ Brodie also suggested that it would be necessary to fight with men and equipment already mobilized. America could no longer wait for a war to start before building up her armed forces. The armed forces would need to make ‘themselves independent of the urban communities and their industries for support’. They would be maintained in isolation, dispersed in secret sites, and ‘protected by storage underground’.28 Showing more optimism than Brodie had for mobilization in war, a 1947 War Department Paper made the point that: ‘The initial strategy of the Armed Forces … is that of absorbing or diverting initial attacks, delivering immediate counter-attacks with long-range bombers or missiles, accomplishing initial essential deployment, and effecting without delay the necessary mobilization of national resources’.29 One requirement for which there was much support, given the assumption that the supreme command could be easily wiped out, was that the local commander should have independent power to release an atomic strike once he was certain that his country had been the recipient of an atomic attack.

The basic axioms of the nuclear age, therefore, were soon identified: the impossibility of defence; the hopeless vulnerability of the world’s major cities; the attraction of a sudden attack; and the necessity of a capability for retaliation. There were inklings of the debates that were to dominate strategists in the coming decades, including the danger of a successful first strike against nuclear forces. It was noted that there might be a paradox of intensive defensive preparations taking on the appearance of a provocative act. General Arnold raised this possibility in 1946: ‘In a world in which atomic weapons are available, the most threatening program that a nation could undertake would be one of general dispersal and fortification’.30 There was nothing systematic or emphatic about the presentation of these notions. Often they stand out only with the benefit of hindsight. At the time they were no more than inklings.