Few concepts in military strategy are more puzzling than the notion of mutually assured destruction. More than frightening, it sounds irrational or even insane to plan for the total obliteration of society, an apparent contradiction of the very motivation for war. Why would anyone propose a strategy in which both sides lose? For all its disturbing and apparently illogical aspects, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or MAD as it came to be called, involved some of the best strategic thinkers of the twentieth century, including presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. It reflected the uncertain times in which decisions were made, the novelty of the weapon, and, quite simply, an inability to come up with anything better.
The origins of MAD date to the strategy of massive aerial bombardment developed in the Second World War. There was little doubt in the spring and summer of 1945 that the Allies would eventually prevail over the Japanese. The only question was how long it would take, how many lives would be lost, and how much destruction would be wrought before the Imperial General Staff finally capitulated.
The strategy to defeat Japan took two parallel paths. First, the Allies waged a relentless campaign to destroy the Japanese war machine, both its troops and the industrial base that supplied them. Simultaneous American thrusts led by Admiral Chester Nimitz (from the east) and General Douglas MacArthur (from the south) were eliminating what remained of the Japanese army, navy, and air force, and were cutting off the home islands from much-needed oil, rubber, and other vital resources. At the same time, under the direction of General Curtis LeMay and Colonel Tommy Powers, a withering strategic bombing campaign was conducted to eliminate war industries, transportation networks, ports, and anything else that might prolong the hostilities. But even the astonishing level of damage caused daily by hundreds of B29 bombers was considered too slow a process to bring to terms a government that had vowed to defend its homeland to the last drop of Japanese blood. So, in parallel with attacks on industrial and military sites, American generals decided to bomb the civilian populations of major cities to destroy their morale and hence hasten an end to the war. It was within this context of purposeful and massive destruction that the decision to use the first atomic bombs was made. Lacking any new policy to govern the use of atomic weapons, they were simply inserted into the existing policy of mass aerial bombardment.
So different was the atomic bomb from all weapons that preceded it that even seasoned military officers refused at first to believe that a single explosion could cause such destruction. This is illustrated in an anecdote related by Harold Agnew, a crewmember on one of the planes involved in the Hiroshima attack and later director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Immediately after the cessation of hostilities, Agnew was assigned to Tinian, the island from which the attacks were launched, to brief visiting generals and admirals on the bomb and its effects. He used the box that held the plutonium core of the Nagasaki bomb, about the only thing that was left after the bombs had been dropped, as a prop. During one of Agnew’s talks the ranking general scowled and said, “Son, you may think that a city could be destroyed by what was in that box, but I don’t have to believe it,” after which he stood up and walked out.
To other officers, the fact that a single bomb could achieve a level of destruction that had previously required thousands of conventional bombs was only a quantitative distinction, a large but nevertheless understandable advance in military capability. More than one hundred thousand people had been killed in the firebombing of Tokyo, more than were killed in either of the atomic attacks, so the sheer level of destruction was not demonstrably different. Many military thinkers viewed atomic bombs as just another weapon in the arsenal, usable against any future enemy that might threaten the interests of the United States.
President Truman thought otherwise, as has every U.S. president since. He saw nuclear weapons as a qualitative shift in warfare, a transition point that separated the past—when wars were frequent but survivable—to a future when conflict might end civilization itself. Truman saw the use of nuclear weapons as a presidential decision and insisted that their development remain in civilian hands. Congress created the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946 to oversee their development, and in the autumn of 1948, Truman formalized presidential authority over atomic weapons in a national security policy memorandum.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE war there were discussions of international controls on nuclear weapons and the special forms of nuclear material—uranium and plutonium—that powered them. Some suggested putting them under the authority of the newly founded United Nations, to be part of an international peacekeeping force. Here Truman had the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who saw the proliferation of nuclear weapons as the only threat to American military superiority.
Such utopian dreams were shattered as the Soviet Union rejected any form of international controls on atomic energy, believing that such policies would only cement the superior position of the Western powers. In 1948, Soviet occupation forces in Germany cut off access to the American, British, and French controlled sectors of Berlin, creating what Winston Churchill described as an “Iron Curtain” separating East and West. That same year, the United States created the Strategic Air Command (SAC) under the leadership of General Curtis E. LeMay, who had previously designed the campaign of massed air attacks on Japan. SAC was responsible for all types of strategic bombing, but it quickly focused on the unique aspects of nuclear warfare.
The American monopoly on nuclear weapons was broken a year later when, in 1949, the Soviets conducted their first nuclear test, well ahead of American intelligence estimates. It was no longer a question of whether the United States should have nuclear weapons, but how those weapons would affect an evolving geopolitical struggle between two irreconcilable political systems. Seeing the Soviet Union as the most likely adversary of the future, General Curtis LeMay and his staff at SAC developed nuclear war plans that included attacks on war-fighting industries, transportation networks, and associated national infrastructure—a direct continuation of the approach he used against Japan. More than two hundred critical targets were identified, including most of the major cities of the Soviet Union, and an intense manufacturing program was launched to supply the nuclear weapons required for such attacks.
At the same time, planners began to assess the effect of a Soviet strike on the United States by long-range bombers and commercial ships, the latter a harbinger of modern worries over terrorist weapons on ships. Tactics and weapons were developed to protect the United States from air and sea attack. The extraordinary destructive power of nuclear weapons meant that anything less than 100 percent success in their interception—something that was already considered impossible—would result in catastrophe.
Pressure was also building for the consideration of nuclear options in otherwise conventional (i.e., nonnuclear) wars. When North Korea marched south on June 25, 1950, the Pentagon feared that all might be lost on the peninsula unless overwhelming force could be brought to bear, and quickly. With hardly enough troops to put up a delaying action, American generals argued for the use of atomic weapons as practical weapons of war, an equalizer against massed Chinese attacks. But a closer analysis revealed that there were few targets in Korea that could not be destroyed with conventional weapons, and wiser minds noted that the use of nuclear weapons against supporting Soviet or Chinese bases could trigger a global war that the United States was ill-prepared to fight. This was the first example of what would become a persistent dilemma in nuclear strategy: The risk of using nuclear weapons could easily outweigh their military benefit. They were not practical instruments of war like battleships and tanks. Their use could trigger an escalation of conflict that was far more destructive than the conflict they were designed to stop.
Nevertheless, General LeMay and other military commanders continued to argue for a first strike against the Soviet Union, a “preventive war” that would settle the nuclear standoff once and for all. Truman was opposed to a first-strike option, but he did authorize contingency planning for war with the Soviet Union, including a fundamental change in how nuclear weapons were to be employed in a strategic conflict. Previously, the highest priority targets were military units and war industries. Now, a “counterforce” strategy was developed that put priority on the destruction of enemy nuclear weapons that could strike the United States. The goal was not to destroy the Soviet Union, but to prevent the Soviet Union from destroying the United States.
After the Russians demonstrated that they too had the atomic bomb, Truman realized that he could no longer unilaterally control nuclear technology. He authorized research into the full spectrum of atomic munitions, from those with yields of only a few tons intended for battlefield applications to megaton behemoths for strategic “city busting.” Edward Teller and conservative elements in the scientific community pushed tirelessly for the United States to start work on the hydrogen bomb. They argued that the Soviets were probably already working on their own “super” bomb and that the United States could not allow itself to be found flat-footed in an arms race. (Russian nuclear weapons designers gave the identical reason for their hydrogen bomb program—the Americans were already well along and the Soviet Union could not place itself at a strategic disadvantage.) The first American test of the hydrogen bomb, code named “Mike,” was conducted in November 1952, graphically demonstrating the almost limitless destructive potential of the H-bomb. It seemed practically impossible to halt the development of new types of atomic weaponry.
DWIGHT EISENHOWER INITIATED his own review of nuclear weapons policy when he was sworn in as U.S. president in 1953. He understood from personal experience the tenuous position of the Western powers in Europe and saw nuclear weapons as the essential balancing factor to massive Soviet troop concentrations deployed on the German border. The United States could not afford to match the Soviets soldier for soldier and tank for tank; nuclear weapons provided a counter at much lower cost. As the Iron Curtain settled into place, American planners began to talk of containment of Soviet expansionism and perhaps an eventual rollback in which the occupied countries of Eastern Europe would be freed from communist domination. The notion of “deterrence” was refined to emphasize the role of nuclear weapons in preventing any provocative action on the part of the Soviets—any move that threatened the United States or its allies would bring a swift and devastating response.
Eisenhower was intensely engaged in all aspects of nuclear strategy, from what policy should govern the use of weapons to how nuclear science might be used for peaceful purposes. Reviving interest in international controls, he announced an “Atoms for Peace” program in his first year in office, which aimed to begin an international dialogue on the future of atomic energy. The stated goal of the program was to find ways to make the peaceful uses of the atom available to other countries while discouraging them from pursuing weapons. Bringing more countries into the nuclear fold was a calculated risk, all the more remarkable in that it occurred at the height of the Cold War.
WHILE EISENHOWER WAS holding out an olive branch, his secretary of state was brandishing a stick. On January 12, 1954, John Foster Dulles gave a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that outlined a new policy of massive retaliation to Soviet aggression. In an apparent abandonment of the idea of nuclear weapons as unique instruments of destruction, a National Security Council directive issued the previous year stated that “the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be available for use as other munitions,” effectively creating a policy of ambiguity that was designed to deter any potential adversary from attacking.
Dulles’s speech was actually penned by Eisenhower, who wanted to present a new approach to the world (Atoms for Peace) while maintaining a strong line against communism. He believed that the Soviets did not want nuclear war any more than did the United States. He was especially concerned that such a war, once started, might be difficult or impossible to control. The first nuclear weapon used would inevitably lead to a second, a third, and so on until there was a massive exchange of hydrogen bombs on each side. To prevent disastrous decisions from being made in the heat of an international crisis, he directed that a Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) be developed to coordinate all nuclear war fighting by American forces. Previously, each military service had its own nuclear plans, some of which interfered with one another. Eisenhower forced the services to accept central planning and control of nuclear weapons, always under direct presidential authority, as a means of ensuring that they followed his strategic policy.
By 1955, the essential questions that would govern all future nuclear debate were firmly established. What is the role of nuclear weapons in fighting limited wars, and how can escalation to full-scale nuclear war be avoided? What is the role of defenses—anti-aircraft missiles and ballistic missile defenses—in nuclear war planning? Finally, how can deterrence be maintained without provoking a nuclear war by stimulating an enemy first strike? The fundamental tension affecting nuclear policy has always been between a commitment to use them if absolutely necessary and a hope that their destructive potential will never be unleashed. To say that you would never use a weapon renders it ineffective as a deterrent to aggression—the adversary knows in advance that you will not shoot and acts accordingly. But to plan on using a nuclear weapon in anything other than the most extreme circumstances might trigger a war in which both sides would lose. Such contradictions have been a constant problem for nuclear planners.
THE HYDROGEN BOMB and the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were parts of an accelerating arms race in which each side considered its very survival dependent on keeping up with, or being just ahead of, its adversary. East-West distrust was fueled by lack of credible information on what the other side was doing, a deficiency that contributed to warnings of a “bomber gap” and later a “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union—gaps that could spell strategic defeat if left uncorrected. The launch of Sputnik in October 1957 only exacerbated fears that the Soviets would soon be able to deliver nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. The tiny satellite itself posed no threat to the United States—it carried neither weapons nor spy cameras—but its very presence in the night sky demonstrated that the rules of strategic war had changed. If the Soviets could put a satellite in orbit, they could use the same missile to put a warhead on an American city, and do so in less than an hour.
A RAND Corporation study done in the early 1950s warned that American bomber bases were vulnerable to a Soviet first strike that could destroy most of our nuclear stockpile, rendering the United States incapable of mounting an effective counterstrike. Two solutions were implemented to deal with these threats. First, a new generation of surface-to-air missile batteries were placed around the country’s borders to defend against incoming Soviet bombers. Second, a new emphasis was placed on the delivery of nuclear weapons by ballistic missiles, ensuring that American warheads could break through the formidable Soviet air defenses. This was the beginning of what came to be known as the “strategic triad” of bombers, land-based missiles in hardened silos, and sea-based ballistic missiles on submarines. Bombers could be controlled right up until the time they dropped their bombs, as opposed to missiles that, once launched, automatically flew to their targets. However, bombers could crash or be shot down. Land-based intercontinental missiles were not vulnerable to enemy air defenses and, in principle, could be controlled from Washington, but they were fixed in location and hence could be destroyed by a massive enemy first strike. Submarines offered the same advantages of land-based missiles and were virtually impossible to detect and destroy, meaning that some would survive to inflict a devastating counterstrike on the Soviet Union. But communication with submarines could be a problem in a time of crisis. Each leg of the triad had its advantages and disadvantages; together they represented an almost indestructible implementation of the theory of deterrence.
Since sea-based missiles were much less accurate than bomber-delivered weapons or ballistic missiles launched from fixed land locations, they necessitated a shift from the evolving “counterforce” strategy, one that focused on eliminating Soviet nuclear capabilities, to a “countervalue” strategy that targeted large population centers. The Polaris missile, itself a modern engineering marvel, was capable of delivering a compact but powerful nuclear warhead over thousands of miles, but it could not ensure that it landed with sufficient precision to destroy Soviet missiles or even bombers that might be located in hardened shelters. The only use for such weapons was against very large “soft” targets such as cities. A shift in policy thus came about as a result of the capabilities and limitations of technology.
Thinking that restraints on nuclear testing were a way to moderate the development of new weapons, Eisenhower reached an agreement with the Soviet Union in 1958 to stop all testing of nuclear weapons. He established the U.S. Disarmament Agency to develop and implement new arms control measures, a first step toward dismantling the massive arsenals that had already been built. It is remarkable that a former general took major steps to reduce what he saw as a growing nuclear threat, especially at a time of intense competition with, and distrust of, the Soviet Union.
EISENHOWER’S POLICIES FOR controlling the use of nuclear weapons in any future conflict still focused on a single massive attack against the Soviet Union. When President John Kennedy was briefed on the country’s nuclear war plans after taking office in 1961, he was astonished at their rigidity and destructiveness. Surely there must be something better than an “all or nothing” strategy that launched the full arsenal in one desperate bid for victory. Kennedy was appalled by the incredible devastation that would ensue from a nuclear exchange, including the projected hundreds of millions of civilian casualties. With Kennedy’s concurrence, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara proposed a “no cities” strategy in which population centers would be avoided in favor of military targets, especially nuclear missiles that could threaten the United States. Recognizing that both sides had to adopt this new approach for it to have any value, he proposed discussions with the Soviets on the rules that might govern a future nuclear war. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union rejected the policy, reinforcing the arguments of General Curtis LeMay (who by that time was chief of staff of the air force) that the only way to deal with the complexities of nuclear war was to mount a massive preemptive strike to destroy the Soviet Union.
Kennedy rejected LeMay’s gamble, and a new SIOP was developed to implement what came to be known as “flexible response,” a limited use of nuclear weapons well short of the massive exchanges of previous plans. The United States would use nuclear weapons only to achieve urgent military objectives. The new SIOP included a reserve force, ending what was essentially a policy of launching everything in one massive strike against the enemy. Even after a “military exchange,” there would be sufficient weapons left over to destroy Soviet society, hence maintaining an assured destruction element to deterrence.
The magnitude of destruction that was “assured” by this reserve force was breathtaking: McNamara projected that a third of the Soviet population and half of its industrial capability would be eliminated by an American counterstrike, a potent deterrent to any rash act on the part of the Kremlin. With these frightening statistics in mind, McNamara tried to stem the unchecked arms race by insisting that the United States needed only enough weapons to accomplish preestablished objectives—there was a point at which “enough was enough.” More weapons just for the sake of more weapons could actually make the country less safe, since a massive nuclear stockpile could frighten a potential adversary into attempting a devastating first strike of its own. Also, the rising cost of nuclear arms meant that fewer resources were available for other vital national security programs.
THE SOVIET UNION broke the moratorium on nuclear testing in 1961 with a rapid series of explosions at their test site on Novaya Zemlya, an island north of the Arctic Circle, and at a desert test range in Kazakhstan. The United States quickly followed suit, and the arms race was back in earnest. However, negotiations aimed at limiting the environmental damage caused by nuclear explosions continued, and just before President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty entered into force, an agreement that outlawed nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, or in space. Only underground tests were to be permitted, a compromise that permitted arms development with much less radioactive fallout. Beyond its immediate goals, the Limited Test Ban Treaty set a precedent for future arms control agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union.
By the early 1960s, the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers had reached staggering levels, with many thousands of weapons on each side. B52 bombers flew circular patterns just outside Soviet airspace, ready to pounce upon preassigned targets on receipt of a properly coded message from the White House. More bombers sat at the ends of runways, engines running, in case a Soviet strike was detected. Missile crews stood alert twenty-four hours a day, and missile-carrying submarines remained submerged and undetected for months at a time. Nuclear warheads appeared on almost every conceivable weapons system, including naval torpedoes, field artillery, and even backpack-sized demolition munitions. Technology was developing so rapidly that a weapon remained in the stockpile only a few years before it was replaced by a newer and more efficient model. Higher yield was not the only objective, as safety and security were major concerns in new weapons. Designers worked to ensure that a bomb would go off only when it was intended to do so and would not explode if involved in an airplane crash, a fire, or other accident.
EUROPE WAS CONSIDERED a flash point in East-West relations. Since the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union and United States each stationed tens of thousands of troops in East and West Germany. Western Europe feared that the Soviet troop concentration was a prelude to invasion, a completion of the land grab that Moscow undertook at the end of the war. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed as a bulwark against possible Soviet aggression, an alliance that linked most European countries with the military might of the United States. (France withdrew, not wishing to place its defense in the hands of others, and developed its own nuclear deterrent to back up its independence.) However, the NATO countries were not willing to match the Soviet Union’s huge and expensive conventional forces and decided to use nuclear weapons as a balance. Under continued pressure from NATO members, a large stockpile of nuclear bombs and missiles was stationed in Europe to counter the massive Soviet conventional forces. Debate continued about what authority, if any, the Europeans should be given in the use of such weapons, discussions that went under the descriptor of “dual key” authorization. The United States wanted the Europeans to think that they had some control over the use of nuclear weapons on their soil, but it was unwilling to simply hand over an atomic arsenal. Dual key authorization required the host country and the American owner to agree before using a nuclear weapon.
The closest the world ever came to nuclear Armageddon was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Alarmed by a clear American lead in both the number and quality of its ballistic missiles, and frustrated at the recent placement of U.S. missiles in Turkey, Khrushchev reached agreement with the Castro government to put Russian missiles in Cuba. While only a relatively small number of weapons were involved, their proximity to the American mainland meant that all the major cities on the eastern seaboard could have been destroyed before America could mount a response. In a rare break from secrecy, the U.S. government showed overhead spy photos of Soviet installations in Cuba and suspicious cargoes on incoming ships in an attempt to force world opinion against the Soviets. Intense negotiations were conducted around the clock, some in the open and some in private phone calls between Washington and Moscow, ending in the agreement that the Soviets would withdraw their weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew ours from Turkey. Emotions ran high on both sides. Whether the world averted nuclear catastrophe by diplomatic skill or simple luck is left for historians to debate.
LIMITATIONS ON OFFENSIVE weapons took a step forward with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) that began in November 1969. Both sides recognized that the number of weapons had grown out of proportion to their practical use in war fighting or even in maintaining a strategic balance. While the United States had an advantage in multiple independent reentry vehicle (MIRV) technology that allowed more than one warhead to be placed on a single missile, the Russians were greatly increasing the number of their ballistic missiles and were well on the way to their own MIRV technology. After intense negotiations, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to limit the number of “strategic” ICBM silos and missiles on submarines. However, the treaty was silent about the many thousands of “tactical” nuclear weapons in the arsenals of both sides, an omission that has continued to complicate arms negotiations to the present day.
WORK ON DEFENSES against nuclear attack increased in the late 1960s, with pressure mounting to deploy a missile defense system in the United States. Lacking the technology to hit an incoming warhead, the Sentinel missile was tipped with a nuclear explosive that was intended to destroy the enemy weapon before it entered the atmosphere. However, owing to opposition to having nuclear-tipped interceptor missiles scattered throughout the country, President Nixon scaled the system down to the defense of a single ICBM field in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Placing defenses around the missiles meant that the Soviets would never be sure of eliminating all of them in a first strike, leaving some for use in an American counterstrike.
To prevent yet another escalation of the arms race that would pit expensive defensive systems against equally expensive offensive missiles, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Anti–Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972. This agreement limited deployment of missile defenses to a maximum of two hundred defensive interceptor missiles defending two sites. (An amendment cut this to one hundred missiles defending a single site.) The United States chose to maintain its plan to defend Grand Forks, while the Soviets chose to deploy their interceptors around Moscow. However, the high cost and relative ineffectiveness of the American system led to its termination in 1976, after only a few years of operation. (The Soviet system continues in operation as I write this.) In a sense, the ABM Treaty cemented mutually assured destruction as a strategy for nuclear warfare in that it limited the ability of either side to defend itself against a massive attack. Vulnerability was set by treaty.
JAMES SCHLESINGER, secretary of defense during the Nixon administration, revived concerns about nuclear war plans that, despite the doctrine of “flexible response,” were still focused on a massive response to Soviet nuclear attack. He reasoned that the extreme damage caused by a counterattack essentially “self-deterred” the United States from ever using nuclear weapons. No American president would order the deaths of tens of millions of civilians, no matter the provocation. To make deterrence believable, Schlesinger argued that “sub-SIOP” options should be developed for the president. The damage caused by such “small” options was still severe, since they involved hundreds of weapons, but it was considerably less than the civilization-threatening destruction that would result from a full-scale strategic exchange of thousands or even tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Also, increasing precision in ballistic missiles meant that the notion of a “counterforce” strategy, one that targeted military sites rather than population centers, could again be considered, another step away from a blind application of mutually assured destruction. Schlesinger’s approach of selected strikes told the Soviets that, if forced to use nuclear weapons, our response would be measured and well short of total war. Emphasis was placed on strategies for “war termination” on terms favorable to the United States and on increasing the number of options available should nuclear use be required. However, critics, who might have been rereading Dwight Eisenhower’s notes, claimed that a limited response actually made nuclear war more likely by making damage more endurable, at least as seen from the cold calculations of military planners. Once again, the conundrum of use versus deterrence reared its head.
NEGOTIATIONS FOR A follow-up to the SALT Treaty were complicated by the rapid advance of technology, including the development of supersonic long-range bombers, cruise missiles, and the proliferation of tactical (i.e., short-range) missile systems in Europe and elsewhere. President Jimmy Carter, taking office in 1977, recommended dramatic reductions in the weapons stockpiles of both countries, a notion rejected by the Soviets, who insisted on keeping to the SALT agenda of moderate controls. Carter did cancel the development of the new long-range B1 bomber and ordered a new study of the proposed MX intercontinental ballistic missile. The latter system was designed to be mobile—the missiles were to be mounted on giant trucks or railcars so that the enemy could never be sure of locating and destroying all of them in a first strike. (President Reagan eventually deployed one hundred of them, with the name “Peacekeeper,” but in fixed silos rather than mobile launchers.)
Carter reemphasized the policy of counterforce and diverted war planners’ focus from Soviet industrial sites to nuclear forces, a further shift from a strategy designed to damage the Soviet Union to one that prevented it from achieving its war aims. He also announced a “no first use” policy for nonnuclear nations that promised not to develop nuclear weapons of their own. The aim was to convince them that there was an advantage to staying nonnuclear. After contentious discussions, the SALT II Treaty was completed in 1979, only to be shelved by the United States following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an example of how nonnuclear events can scuttle treaties presumably in the best interests of both parties.
RONALD REAGAN TOOK office in 1981 with strong views on international relations. He saw the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire” and thought that security could only be maintained by a manifest show of strength in all areas of military preparedness. However, Reagan, like all presidents since Truman, disliked the very idea of nuclear weapons and sought to find some new way out of the strategic morass of mutually assured destruction. Part of the solution, he reasoned, would be to engage the American scientific establishment in the development of a “leakproof shield” of ballistic missile defense that would nullify any advantage that the Soviets might have in attacking the United States. While certainly not the first attempt at large-scale defensive systems, the Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly called Star Wars) tried to shift the focus of nuclear strategy away from a massive counterattack toward defense against a first strike. At the same time, Reagan began a sweeping modernization of the American nuclear deterrent that included new bombs and warheads and a much more accurate missile for the navy that allowed precision targeting of Soviet military installations by sea-launched weapons.
While he was overseeing one of the largest arms buildups in recent history, Reagan met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to discuss nuclear arms control measures. Fearing that the Soviets would break any agreement not to their liking, Reagan focused on intrusive inspection measures in accord with his mantra of “Trust, but verify.” For the first time, American and Soviet inspectors would visit the nuclear installations of the other side and see with their own eyes that limits on warheads, bombers, and missiles were being observed. Not to be outdone, and perhaps recognizing that the Soviet Union could not hope to compete with the United States in Reagan’s massive revamping of nuclear systems, Gorbachev went even further to propose the elimination of all nuclear weapons by the year 2000, on the condition that the Americans give up on missile defense. Reagan refused, convinced that defense offered an escape from the MAD doctrine of his predecessors. The option of nuclear disarmament, real or imagined, faded from the superpower agenda.
Arms control initiatives continued on other fronts with agreements to remove short-range nuclear missiles from Europe and to limit the energy of nuclear test explosions to no more than 150 kilotons. The latter agreement included the option for the other side to place monitoring equipment at the test site to verify that the limit was being observed.
THE END OF the Cold War presented new challenges to the nuclear strategist, most notably that both sides were left with massive nuclear arsenals without any apparent missions. With Russia no longer considered an adversary of the United States, what was the purpose of strategic nuclear weapons? What was the role of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe when the Soviet conventional threat had disappeared and German unification was now the topic of the day? President George H. W. Bush attempted to take advantage of the new world order by pressing forward with a new round of arms limitation talks that concluded with the START I Treaty of 1991. (For various reasons, not least of which was the collapse of the Soviet Union, the treaty did not take effect until the end of 1994.) He canceled several American nuclear weapons programs, took strategic bombers off alert, and ordered the destruction of all short-range nuclear weapons such as those in artillery shells and on short-range rockets. The Strategic Air Command, a symbol of the Cold War nuclear standoff, was disbanded and replaced with United States Strategic Command, an organization with a broader mandate that included defense as well as offense. Finally, Bush ordered the cessation of all nuclear tests, with the intention of limiting any future arms race and to discourage other countries from using U.S. testing as an excuse for their own programs.
Perhaps the most remarkable effort of the post–Cold War period was initiated in 1992 by two U.S. senators—Sam Nunn of Georgia and Dick Lugar of Indiana. In an unprecedented act of cooperation, one that would hardly have been dreamed of just a decade before, they created the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program that provided assistance to the Russians in destroying large numbers of redundant bombers, missiles, silos, submarines, and other relics of the Cold War. American advisers and equipment were sent to Russia to cut the wings off bombers, blow up concrete missile silos, and chop up nuclear submarines. In the years since its inception, the CTR program has destroyed hundreds of strategic weapons platforms, achieving more than any arms control program in history. Given the enormous cost of weapons development during the Cold War, it may have been the best use of defense dollars ever.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON, inaugurated in 1993, continued the disarmament momentum established by George H. W. Bush and attempted to make the test moratorium permanent by signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. However, after extensive discussions, the United States Senate was unconvinced that computer calculations and laboratory experiments could maintain the nuclear deterrent indefinitely, and it refused to ratify the treaty. While the United States has not conducted a nuclear explosion since 1992, it is under no legal obligation to refrain from testing should the need arise.
Other arms controls measures, most notably the START II Treaty of 1996, were negotiated to further limit long-range nuclear forces, but turmoil within the newly created Russian Federation led to Russian insistence on several provisions that were not accepted by the American side, leaving the treaty in limbo.
THE SECOND PRESIDENT BUSH’S term in office was dominated by the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, he took a keen interest in nuclear matters. The Treaty of Moscow, a remarkably short and informal document considering the complexity of its predecessors, mandated that the number of strategic warheads be reduced to the range of seventeen hundred to twenty-two hundred, a major reduction from Cold War levels. Bush recognized that the geopolitical situation had changed in a fundamental way and that he had the opportunity to significantly reduce a nuclear threat that might arise from a recidivist Russian government.
Part of Bush’s willingness to reduce the American nuclear stockpile was based on the clear superiority of American conventional military hardware, a superiority graphically demonstrated in the two Persian Gulf wars. Russian generals were shocked when the Iraqis, equipped with reasonably modern Soviet military hardware and tactics, failed dismally in their response to American assaults on land and in the air. What had just a few years before appeared as a massive Soviet military juggernaut turned out to be a paper tiger. Bush capitalized on the American technological advantage and broadened the mission of the United States Strategic Command from being exclusively nuclear to include all aspects of strategic attack and defense, including long-range conventional weapons (such as conventional warheads on high-precision ballistic missiles), cyber warfare, and missile defense. For the first time since the invention of the atomic bomb, other technologies were seen as superior to nuclear weapons in achieving certain high-priority missions.
However, any gloating on the part of American generals was short-lived when, taking a page out of Cold War NATO strategy, Russia realized that the inferiority of its conventional forces could only be compensated for by a greater reliance on tactical nuclear systems. During the early years of the new century the Russians embarked on an extensive program of modernization of their nuclear forces, including new low-yield weapons on short-range missiles and maneuvering warheads that could evade American missile defenses.
OVER THE SIX decades since Hiroshima, nuclear strategy has oscillated between deterrence based on assured destruction and attempts to limit the destruction from any nuclear war that did occur. The end of the Cold War, the defining strategic standoff of the twentieth century, presents a new opportunity for creative thinking in dealing with nuclear issues, one that must not be squandered lest we find ourselves back in the same debates that challenged Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy.