Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence

by Steven E. Miller

Overview

This book of selections from the distinguished journal International Security speaks to the most important question of our age: the deterrence of nuclear war.

Originally published in 1985.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691611990
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	International Security Readers , #749
Pages:	314
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

Read an Excerpt

Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence

An International Security Reader

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By Steven E. Miller

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04712-6

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CHAPTER 1

The Development of Nuclear Strategy

Bernard Brodie

That concept was put forward almost at once at the beginning of the nuclear age that is still the dominant concept of nuclear strategy — deterrence. It fell to me — few other civilians at the time were interested in military strategy — to publish the first analytical paper on the military implications of nuclear weapons. Entitled "The Atomic Bomb and American Security," it appeared in the autumn of 1945 as No. 18 of the occasional papers of what was then the Yale Institute for International Studies. In expanded form it was included as two chapters in a book published in the following year under the title The Absolute Weapon, which contained also essays on political implications by four of my Yale colleagues.

I should like to cite one brief paragraph from that 1946 book, partly because it has recently been quoted by a number of other writers, usually with approval but in one conspicuous instance with strong disapproval:

Thus, the first and most vital step in any American security program for the age of atomic bombs is to take measures to guarantee to ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind. The writer in making that statement is not for the moment concerned about who will win the next war in which atomic bombs are used. Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.

It was obvious then as now that this description of deterrence applied mostly to a war with the only other superpower, the Soviet Union, who did not yet have nuclear weapons but was confidently predicted in the same book to be able "to produce them in quantity within a period of five to ten years."

Let me mention a few more points in that 1946 essay in order to indicate what any reflective observer of the time would have found more or less self-evident. It stated that among the requirements for deterrence were extraordinary measures of protection for the retaliatory force so that it might survive a surprise attack, that margins of superiority in nuclear weapons or the means of delivering them might count for little or nothing in a crisis so long as each side had reason to fear the huge devastation of its peoples and territories by the other, that while it was possible that the world might see another major war in which the nuclear bomb is not used, the shadow of that bomb would nevertheless "so govern the strategic and tactical dispositions of either side as to create a wholly novel form of war," and that this latter fact had particular implications for the uses of sea power, the classic functions of which depended on an intact home base and the passage of considerable time. It was also observed that while the idea of deterrence per se was certainly nothing new, being as old as the use of physical force, what was distinctively new was the degree to which it was intolerable that it should fail. On the other hand, one could add that "in no case is the fear of the consequences of atomic bomb attack likely to be low," which made it radically different from a past in which governments could, often correctly, anticipate wars that would bring them considerable political benefits while exacting very little in the way of costs.

Since 1946 there has been much useful rumination and writing on nuclear strategy and especially on the nature of deterrence, but the national debates on the subject have revolved mostly around three questions, all relating directly to the issue of expenditures. These three questions are: 1) What are the changing physical requirements for the continuing success of deterrence? 2) Just what kinds of wars does nuclear deterrence really deter? and 3) What is the role, if any, for tactical nuclear weapons? Far down the course in terms of the public attention accorded it is a fourth question: If deterrence fails, how do we fight a nuclear war and for what objectives? The latter question has been almost totally neglected by civilian scholars, though lately some old ideas have been revived having to do with what are called limited nuclear options. Otherwise most questions about the actual use of nuclear weapons in war, whether strategic or tactical, have been largely left to the military, who had to shoulder responsibility for picking specific targets, especially in the strategic category, and who were expected to give guidance about the kinds and numbers of nuclear weapons required.

In that connection, one must stress a point which certain young historians who are new to the field have found it difficult to grasp. Virtually all the basic ideas and philosophies about nuclear weapons and their use have been generated by civilians working quite independently of the military, even though some resided in institutions like Rand which were largely supported by one or another of the services. In these matters the military have been, with no significant exceptions, strictly consumers, naturally showing preference for some ideas over others but hardly otherwise affecting the flow of those ideas. Whatever the reasons, they must include prominently the fact that to the military man deterrence comes as the by-product, not the central theme, of his strategic structure. Any philosophy which puts it at the heart of the matter must be uncongenial to him. One military writer significantly speaks of the deterrence-oriented "modernist" as dwelling "in the realm of achieving non-events in a condition where the flow of events is guided, not by his initiatives, but by other minds." And further: "The obvious difficulty with deterrent theory ... is the yielding of the initiative to the adversary." In the preceding sentence initiative has already been called the sine qua non of success.

The Requirements for Deterrence

How does one preserve against surprise attack enough of one's retaliatory force so that the opponent, in anticipation thereof, is deterred? Obviously there is a political dimension to this question, because the need for precautionary measures does vary according to whether or not we think the opponent is straining at the leash to destroy us. There used to be current a notion that if the opponent saw his way clear to destroy us without suffering too much damage in return, that fact alone must impel him to do it. But whether or not that view was ever correct, which I doubt, it is not likely ever to be a feasible option for him. Still, to prepare against all possible crises in the future, it is desirable to minimize that proportion of our retaliatory forces which the opponent can have high confidence of destroying by a surprise blow and to help keep alive in his mind full awareness of the penalties for miscalculation.

At the beginning, the United States had a period of grace when it did not have to worry about enemy nuclear attack. However, conditions changed with the passing years, but the first sharp public reminder that we had an important vulnerability problem came only with the publication early in 1959 of Albert Wohlstetter's well-known article, "The Delicate Balance of Terror." What is not generally known is that this article was precipitated by Wohlstetter's frustration with the Air Force. He had been leading for over a year a large research project at Rand which had been trying to find the best means of protecting our bomber aircraft against surprise attack. After considering various alternatives, including the "airborne alert" favored by the Air Force (which was itself second choice for them to the Douhetian idea of striking at the enemy before he gets off the ground), the project group decided that the most cost-effective defense of bombers against surprise attack was a slightly-below-ground concrete shelter for each aircraft. This solution the Air Force vehemently rejected, invoking slogans which identified concrete with the Maginot Line and with excessive defense-mindedness. Wohlstetter's article was thus an appeal to the public, which by its response showed itself both surprised and alarmed at the situation he depicted — the more so as his elegant use of the facts and figures at his fingertips lent persuasiveness to his message.

However, that problem too passed without ever being resolved, because the article appeared on the eve of the coming of the ICBM, which lent itself to being put underground without controversy, and not far behind was the Polaris submarine. Wohlstetter had been concerned with defending bombers, mostly against bomber attack. We still have bombers as one of the legs of our so-called triad, and now these have to fear enemy missile attack. The Air Force still has no shelters for these bombers and does not contemplate any. Obviously, it still relies on their being in the air when the enemy attack arrives. In fact, on the often-mentioned grounds that they can be sent off early because they are recallable, our bombers are frequently projected as virtually a non-vulnerable retaliatory force. Well, perhaps they are, if one knows just how to read and respond to various types of ambiguous warning. The problem is not only not to send them off so late but also not to send them off too early.

However, I do support fully the belief implicit in the Air Force position that some kind of political warning will always be available. Attack out of the blue, which is to say without a condition of crisis, is one of those worst-case fantasies that we have to cope with as a starting point for our security planning, but there are very good reasons why it has never happened historically, at least in modern times, and for comparable reasons I regard it as so improbable for a nuclear age as to approach virtual certainty that it will not happen, which is to say it is not a possibility worth spending much money on.

For similar reasons, I must add before leaving the Wohlstetter article that I could never accept the implications of his title — that the balance of terror between the Soviet Union and the United States ever has been or ever could be "delicate." My reasons have to do mostly with human inhibitions against taking monumental risks or doing things which are universally detested, except under motivations far more compelling than those suggested by Wohlstetter in his article. This point is more relevant today than ever before because of the numbers and variety of the American forces that an enemy would need to have a high certitude of destroying in one fell swoop.

The numbers of those forces, incidentally, grew during the nineteen sixties like the British Empire was said to have grown — in a series of fits of absentmindedness. There are reasons why the number 1000 was chosen rather than a lesser number for our Minuteman missiles, in addition to our 54 Titans, and also why we chose to build 41 Polaris-Poseidon submarines capable of firing 16 missiles each, in addition to the 400 plus B-52s we had at the time, not to mention the quick reaction alert forces we have long had in Europe. But whatever those reasons were, they were not a response to Soviet figures. They in fact gave us, or rather continued, an overwhelming superiority, later increased by the application of the MIRV system to over half our Minuteman missiles, and three-quarters of our submarines. We are still today far superior in numbers of strategic warheads, and we also have a marked advantage in the important factor of accuracy.

In the mid-sixties the United States defense community could look with satisfaction on our immense superiority in retaliatory forces which appeared also utterly secure by virtue of being for the most part either underground or underwater. However, our restless research efforts were already tending to undermine that stable and comfortable situation by pushing to fruition the most incredible advances in ballistic missile accuracy, even without terminal guidance. Those advances resulted partly from developments in micro-electronics circuitry, which made it feasible to put complex computers aboard missiles and to integrate them with hypersensitive inertial-guidance gyros. Reliable unclassified estimates put the Circular Error Probabilities of today's American ICBMs at well under 300 yards, which is utterly fantastic for an object being hurled some 4000 miles. When that kind of accuracy is combined with MIRV, the silo-emplaced ICBM begins to be at risk. To be sure, the United States has continued to lead in these developments by a wide margin, and our accuracy does not imperil our silos, but the long lead times that some systems require make it appear provident, usually, to anticipate the opponent's canceling out some specific technological advantage of ours.

Meanwhile, new discoveries on the effects of X-rays above the atmosphere had rekindled interest in the development of an ABM system. Progress was proceeding towards the system originally called "Sentinel," which President Nixon was to rename "Safeguard," when the developments in missile accuracy seemed suddenly to give it an important purpose. Up to then it had been a system in search of a mission. Inasmuch as most of its advocates admitted that the ABM could not reliably defend cities, interest focused on its use in defending hard-point targets, which is to say missile silos. Then there arose the great ABM controversy, an amazing chapter in our story because of the intense passions engendered among the adversaries. Moreover, unlike certain other controversies, it was not a debate between the informed and the ignorant. There was plenty of technological sophistication on both sides.

My objectivity in this article will not, I hope, be utterly compromised if I admit that I could never fully understand the pro-ABM position. It always seemed to me that in the expensive and fixed "Safeguard" mode readied for adoption — and later actually deployed at one site in North Dakota — the ABM could in principle .be defeated in a number of ways that were already on the horizon, including hardening the reentry vehicle against the X-rays of the Spartan missile warhead, cheaply multiplying the number of reentry vehicles as is done with MIRV, adopting terminal avoidance maneuvering in the RV, or even, if all else failed, abandoning the long-range ballistic missile in favor of the cruise missile, against which the radar of "Safeguard" would be ineffective.

Now, in retrospect, we can add that it is most questionable whether American ICBMs needed any such protection at the time that "Safeguard" with its complex but fixed technology was being readied for deployment, or whether they will need it for a long time to come, if ever. Only about 23 percent of U.S. strategic nuclear warheads are carried in ICBMs as compared with about two-thirds for the Soviet Union. Our silos have already been super-hardened. An attack on our ICBMs would involve enormous timing problems for the Soviet Union, especially with most of their ICBMs still of the liquid-fuel variety. No one yet knows what kinds of fratricidal problems will arise among RVs detonating near each other within a short space of time. It would be an optimistic Soviet planner who did not count on some two or three hundred of our ICBMs surviving even a well-concerted attack from much more accurate Soviet missiles than they have today, and that says nothing about the 7 to 8 thousand warheads in the other two legs of our triad. Surely no sensible opponent would try to eliminate our ICBMs in an initial attack unless he believed that he could at the same time with high confidence eliminate by far the major portions of our other retaliatory forces. One important meaning of the triad, in other words, is that each of the legs helps protect the other two. Besides, how would the Russians know that we would not launch our ICBMs on tactical warning, or at least during an attack which could hardly be simultaneous? In short, the utility of the ABM over the long term was at best dubious, but surely it was desirable to avoid deploying a technologically-fixed system well before it was really needed.

Anyway, our Safeguard ABM was effectively cancelled by the agreements of SALT I, incidentally demonstrating that the greater utility of arms control agreements lies not in enhancing our security, which is usually beyond their power, but in helping to save both sides from wasteful expenditures.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence by Steven E. Miller. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. v
• The Contributors, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• The Development of Nuclear Strategy, pg. 3
• Nuclear Strategy: A Case for a Theory of Victory, pg. 23
• Deterrence and Perception, pg. 57
• Inadvertent Nuclear War ?, pg. 85
• The Origins of Overkill, pg. 113
• U.S. Strategic Nuclear Concepts in the 1970s, pg. 183
• U.S. Strategic Forces, pg. 215
• The Countervailing Strategy, pg. 245
• The Political Potential of Equivalence, pg. 255
• The Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons, pg. 273