Those who make the argument that superiority does not matter overlook the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union have foreign policy objectives that are diametrically opposed. Whether a leader in Washington or Moscow wields nuclear superiority would have decisively different consequences for the world.
The United States is a defensive power. It has never been an offensive power. Circumstances, not a conscious plan, made the United States a superpower. If the Soviet Union had not threatened to subordinate Western Europe after World War II, the United States would have retreated into its prewar isolation. If it were possible, most Americans would still like to return to the simpler days when the United States was on the periphery of world events.
The Soviet Union is an offensive power. Its stated goal today is a communist world ruled from Moscow. No one in the nineteen countries dominated by Moscow would deny this. Not even the communists in Beijing—who were close allies with their comrades in Moscow for a decade—dispute this. The Sino–Soviet split occurred because the Kremlin leaders insisted that the Chinese submit to Soviet leadership. This does not imply that Kremlin leaders have the global equivalent of the Schlieffen plan secreted away in a Kremlin vault. Gorbachev does not want war. A world of charred cities and dead bodies is a dubious prize. But he does want to expand Soviet control by means short of war. The threat of nuclear war, implicit and explicit, is an indispensable instrument in this effort.
Whether a defensive or an offensive power has nuclear superiority makes a profound difference. Superiority in the hands of a defensive power is a guarantee of peace; superiority in the hands of an offensive power is a threat to peace. Aggressors embark on war when they believe they hold a significant military edge. To preserve peace, a defensive power must be strong enough to convince potential aggressors that they cannot prevail by resort to arms.
For a quarter century, from the end of World War II to the early 1970s, the United States had nuclear superiority. Western Europe remains free today because American nuclear superiority offset the Kremlin’s massive conventional superiority. At its peak in the mid-1950s American superiority served as a powerful deterrent to Soviet adventurism and aggression in other regions. No one in the Kremlin took it lightly when John Foster Dulles explained that the American doctrine of massive retaliation meant the United States would respond to communist expansionism “at a time and place of its own choosing.” Kremlin leaders knew that the time would be the twelve hours a B-52 needed to cross the Arctic and that the place would be Moscow.
Nothing could have prevented the gradual erosion of American superiority. But the tendency among nuclear revisionists to downgrade the decisive role of nuclear diplomacy since 1945 contradicts history. American nuclear superiority was the key to the our success in the Korean War in the early 1950s, in the Suez crisis in 1956, in the Berlin crisis in 1959, and in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
In the Korean War, America was fighting not only to repel communist aggression on the Korean peninsula but also to protect an unarmed Japan and to discourage Soviet and Chinese expansionism elsewhere in Asia. By 1953, after the Chinese intervention, the war in Korea had bogged down into a stalemate near the 38th parallel. With South Korea rescued, the American people soon tired of the continuing bloodshed and certainly would not consider an escalation in conventional U.S. forces. President Eisenhower also opposed a prolonged ground war in Asia. He therefore instructed John Foster Dulles to inform India’s ambassador to the United Nations, Krishna Menon, who had good relations with both Communist China and the Soviet Union, that the President’s patience was wearing thin and that he was considering the use of nuclear weapons in Korea. As a result, after a half year with Eisenhower in office, an armistice was signed in July 1953.
In the Suez crisis, Eisenhower faced the threat of a Soviet intervention in the Middle East. After the British and the French intervened militarily to wrest control of the Suez Canal from President Nasser of Egypt, Khrushchev tried unsuccessfully to convince Eisenhower that the two superpowers should jointly deploy forces to compel London and Paris to withdraw. The Soviet leader then threatened to send forces to help Egypt unilaterally and to shoot Soviet missiles at Britain and France as covering fire. Eisenhower instructed the American commander of NATO to deliver our response. In a press conference, General Gruenther, the NATO commander, described what would happen if Khrushchev followed through on his threats: “Moscow would be destroyed as night follows day.” Khrushchev backed down.
In the Berlin crisis in 1959, the Soviet Union sought to conclude a separate peace treaty with East Germany, which would have had the effect not only of formalizing Soviet control over the government in East Berlin in violation of wartime Allied agreements, but also of obstructing Western access to West Berlin. In a press conference, Eisenhower seemed to equivocate. He said that we were “certainly not going to fight a ground war in Europe” and that “nuclear war as a general thing looks to me a self-defeating thing for all of us,” but he added that we were “never going to back up on our rights and responsibilities” and that he “didn’t say that nuclear war is a complete impossibility.” Four days later, in congressional testimony, the chief of the U.S. Air Force removed all doubt as to what Eisenhower meant. He declared unequivocally that if we were challenged in Berlin we would use nuclear weapons. As a result, while Khrushchev continued his bluster over the Berlin issue, he did not follow through on his threat to act unilaterally.
In the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the nuclear diplomacy of President Kennedy, while unspoken, was the key to forcing Khrushchev’s hand. When Kennedy discovered that Khrushchev had secretly shipped missiles to Cuba, the President demanded their removal and backed up his words with a naval blockade. When confronted with the U.S. threat to board and search a Soviet freighter, Khrushchev countered by saying that this “would make talk useless,” bring into action “the forces of war,” and have “irretrievably fatal consequences.” Kennedy called Khrushchev’s nuclear bluff. Khrushchev backed down, though not before he extracted American promises to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and not to support anti-Castro forces in Cuba or the United States. While some former Kennedy administration officials today contend that overwhelming American conventional, not nuclear, superiority played the decisive role, it is highly doubtful that our conventional superiority would have been persuasive enough to deter Khrushchev if it were not backed up with massive U.S. nuclear superiority.
In those four cases, the United States prevailed. In each case we had vital interests at stake, we had a margin of nuclear superiority, the President demonstrated unquestionably his will to do whatever was necessary to protect U.S. interests, and, except in Cuba, an American intervention with conventional forces either was impossible or would not have carried the day. Only American nuclear superiority made the difference. In Korea, it ended a war. In Suez, it kept the Soviets out of the Middle East. In Berlin, it prevented a superpower clash in Central Europe. In Cuba, it prevented Moscow from stationing nuclear forces ninety miles from the United States.
Those who contend that superiority is irrelevant in the nuclear age forget how useful it was when we had it. But a tale of two crises, in Iran in 1945 and Afghanistan in 1979, demonstrates its importance conclusively. In both 1945 and 1979, Moscow had overwhelming superiority in conventional forces, not only in Southwest Asia but also worldwide. In 1945, America had a nuclear monopoly. By 1979, Moscow had attained nuclear parity with the United States and even had acquired a decisive superiority in land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In 1945, at a time when wartime agreements required the withdrawal of Soviet, British, and American forces from Iran, Stalin attempted to carve off two provinces for eventual incorporation into the Soviet empire. He engineered proclamations of independence by the Kurdish People’s Republic and the Autonomous Republic of Azerbaidzhan. President Truman, who had learned his lesson very early in trusting the Soviets in Europe, sent Stalin a back-channel message threatening grave con
sequences if Soviet forces did not leave Iran. Given the American monopoly in nuclear weapons, Stalin had little choice but to comply and did so within months. The United States had no conventional forces to compel Moscow to withdraw, for Washington had already pulled its troops out of Iran and was demobilizing most of its forces from World War II. That meant Stalin could only have been reacting to U.S. nuclear superiority.
In 1979, as the communist government of Afghanistan neared the brink of collapse in the face of an anticommunist insurrection, the Soviet Union rapidly built up its invasion forces on the Soviet–Afghan border. Though slow in recognizing the growing danger, the Carter administration finally warned Moscow that a Soviet intervention in Afghanistan would bring grave consequences. But President Carter had neither the conventional nor the nuclear forces to back up that threat. Kremlin leaders knew that the only immediate options the President could choose were a total nuclear war on the one hand or a set of political and economic measures on the other. Moscow concluded that this choice was no choice and ordered 85,000 troops to invade Afghanistan.
Only one conclusion is possible: When the United States had nuclear superiority, it could deter Soviet expansionism. Once the Soviet Union erased our nuclear advantage, it was free to exploit its own massive superiority in conventional forces. Like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that did not bark, the critical clue to understanding the importance of nuclear superiority in the case of Afghanistan was the threat the United States could not make.
The key lesson we must learn is that if superiority was so decisive in our hands it would be no less decisive in Moscow’s. But the danger is that for the last twenty years the United States has been slipping toward nuclear inferiority.
Official views on nuclear weapons inside the Kremlin differ strikingly from those inside the Washington beltway. Americans believe that nuclear war is unthinkable. In its two-hundred-year history the United States has lost a total of 650,000 lives in war. Therefore, in the minds of Americans, no rational leader could contemplate starting a war that would kill tens of millions of people.
But the leaders of the Soviet Union, which has lost over 100 million lives in civil war, two world wars, purges, and famines in this century, have a different perspective. Kremlin leaders put an entirely different value on human life. The Soviet government, after all, killed tens of millions of its own citizens just for the sake of creating collective farms. While the Soviet Union has been a victim in war, its government has made victims of millions of its own people. Also, while those who have experienced such great wartime suffering cannot be eager to repeat it, they do know it can be survived. They also know, since it happened once, that it could happen again. That means Kremlin leaders, unlike Americans, think seriously about the unthinkable and plan for it. While the current Soviet propaganda line is that a nuclear war is unthinkable, Moscow intends to take whatever measures will help it prevail if the unthinkable ever occurs.
As a result, after the Cuban missile crisis, superpower strategies totally diverged. Washington made a conscious decision to relinquish its nuclear superiority; Moscow made a conscious decision to acquire it.
If the lesson of Cuba was the importance of nuclear superiority, the Kennedy administration failed to learn it. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara decided that the United States would deploy no more than one thousand land-based missiles. He assumed the Kremlin leaders shared his belief that after a point building nuclear weapons became meaningless. He also expected Moscow to stop further deployments when it drew even with the United States.
The Kremlin leaders thought otherwise. Moscow spared no efforts in its drive for nuclear superiority. After Khrushchev backed down in the 1962 confrontation, a Soviet official, Deputy Foreign Minister Kuznetsov, told American negotiator John J. McCloy, “You Americans will never be able to do this to us again.” Moscow has kept its word.
Since 1963, the Soviet Union has deployed eleven new types of long-range ballistic missiles, while the United States has fielded only three new types. Since 1975, Moscow has produced and deployed 840 new long-range missiles; we have deployed 310. The Kremlin has deployed the world’s only anti–ballistic-missile defense system around Moscow and a continental antiaircraft defense around the entire perimeter of the Soviet Union. It has spent over $150 billion on strategic defense, including billions of dollars for research and testing of exotic laser and particle-beam weapons. It has constructed an elaborate system of nuclear shelters for protecting its top 175,000 military and political leaders. Meanwhile, the Congress balks at allocating just $5 billion a year for the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Statistics abound in the calculation of the superpower nuclear balance. Only one matters: the ratio of first-strike warheads to first-strike targets. A first-strike warhead is one that is accurate and powerful enough to destroy a target protected against nuclear attack. A first-strike target is a strategic nuclear weapon, like a land-based missile or a wartime communications facility. If a country’s first-strike warheads far outnumbered the enemy’s first-strike targets, it would have the capability in theory to launch a preemptive attack that would leave the enemy unable to retaliate except by launching inaccurate sea- or air-based weapons against cities. A successful first-strike attack does not mean simply that one side strikes first, hitting both cities and military targets, but that the attack fatallv damages the other side’s strategic nuclear forces and communications systems and therefore its ability to respond with precise attacks on military targets or even to retaliate at all.
We face the problem that the Soviet Union’s stockpile of first-strike warheads has been rising rapidly. Unlike the United States, the Soviet Union did not stop after reaching the level of 1,006 land-based missiles. It kept production lines rolling at full bore. Its deployments peaked at 1,620. Moscow then turned to replacing old missiles with newer and more accurate ones. As a result, the Soviet Union had 5,240 first-strike warheads in 1985 and will have at least 8,000 in 1995. The fact that the United States has only 1,500 first-strike targets casts the Soviet strategic threat into stark relief.
Moscow’s favorable ratio of warheads to targets does not mean that Kremlin leaders are quietly priming their missiles for a first strike. Gorbachev knows that a first strike would be the most complicated technological operation in the history of warfare. Complex weapons never tested under wartime conditions would have to work perfectly, and any error could lead to total disaster. Clausewitz warned that “everything in war is simple but the simplest thing is difficult.” Gorbachev understands that. He will be especially cautious of putting too much faith in high technology after the melt-down at Chernobyl and the explosion of Challenger. He will not casually stake the future of his country on a high-tech roll of the dice.
But technology continues to advance. When nuclear weapons were first invented, professional military men ridiculed the idea that they could be delivered by rockets to targets half a world away. Today, both sides have weapons that can reliably destroy even those targets that are specially hardened to withstand nuclear attack. In the future, missiles will become ever more accurate, and the uncertainties of a first-strike attack will diminish.
Although a Soviet first strike remains highly unlikely, Moscow’s massive strategic buildup poses three real threats to the United States:
If war were to break out, the Soviet Union now has the capability to destroy 90 percent of U.S. land-based strategic forces in a first strike and have enough warheads left over to take out our cities. A President then would face a stark choice. With 90 percent of his most accurate missiles gone, he would not have enough left to take out the remaining Soviet land-based missiles. He could choose either to attack Soviet cities with less accurate sea-based or airborne weapons, which would in turn lead to an even more devastating reprisal on American cities, or to acquiesce to Soviet war demands. Putting it more bluntly, his options would be surrender or suicide.
If the Soviet Union were to launch an attack with conventional forces on American vital
interests—such as the Persian Gulf—we would face a double dilemma. On the one hand, if the United States did not have conventional forces to counter Moscow, a President without nuclear superiority could not force the Soviet Union to back off with a nuclear threat. On the other hand, even if the United States did have significant conventional forces available, as was the case in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the Kremlin could engage in nuclear blackmail. It could threaten the United States with its superiority in nuclear weapons and thereby deter an American conventional intervention.
If the strategic imbalance leads our allies to conclude that our nuclear umbrella is riddled with holes, the West Europeans and the Japanese might decide to seek a separate accommodation with Moscow. If our allies do not believe in our nuclear-security guarantees, our alliances would soon dissolve. While we would have avoided nuclear war, we would have been defeated without war.
To achieve real peace, we must be able to deter Moscow. But our deterrent is imperiled. We face a fundamental problem: A threat to commit mutual suicide is not credible, and a threat which is not credible will not deter.
The most popular concept among foreign-policy experts is that the United States does not need to enhance deterrence and should base its strategy on the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. They begin with the premise that superiority is impossible in the nuclear age. They then argue that since both superpowers have thousands of nuclear weapons, neither could destroy all of the other’s strategic forces in a first strike. That means that even after a first strike the victim could inflict unacceptable damage on the aggressor in a retaliatory attack. Even a loser in nuclear war could decimate the winner. Advocates of mutual assured destruction also argue that a strategic defense, even if possible, is undesirable because it would reduce the ability of one side to retaliate against the other.
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