Perhaps the editor’s preference was justified two decades ago, when the United States enjoyed overwhelming strategic nuclear superiority over the U.S.S.R. Perhaps then the American people could afford to live in blissful ignorance of the dread facts of superpower conflict and a potential nuclear exchange. Such a conflict, such an exchange, could reasonably be judged to lie outside the arena of the possible.
But the “unthinkable” has become not only thinkable, but something about which we must think. The loss of American strategic superiority requires that we understand the probabilities and consequences of a possible nuclear exchange. Further, we must understand the concept of strategic balance, which could prevent such an exchange.
Nuclear superiority was very useful to us when we had it. It will be mortally dangerous for us if we allow the Russians to get it and keep it.
The fact is that a strategic advantage for the United States and the West reduces the danger of war or defeat without war. A strategic advantage for the Soviet Union increases the danger of war or defeat of the West without war. With the spectre of strategic inferiority staring us in the face, we must act now to restore the balance of power so that we can deter Soviet aggression and retain freedom for ourselves and all free nations. And I must emphasize now, for the strategic balance is rapidly becoming, in the words of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, “acutely dangerous,” while our options for dealing with limited local Soviet aggression have already been reduced in most parts of the world to near zero.
The United States and the U.S.S.R. are the only two superpowers. In nuclear strength the Soviets are rapidly moving into a position of clear-cut superiority. That superiority is particularly threatening because of two deeply disturbing facts: First, it will be attained before the United States can do anything about it given present programs and funding. Second, it will be characterized by dangerous vulnerabilities in our deterrent forces and by a gross disparity favoring the Soviet Union in the ability to fight, win, and recover from a nuclear war. That means that the Soviet leaders will be able to “deter our deterrent” and threaten us more credibly with nuclear escalation than we can threaten them. At the same time, the Soviets have an enormous advantage over us in conventional ground forces and in theater nuclear forces—those designed for use within a specific region such as Europe or the Far East. Their geographical proximity to many of the prospective areas of confrontation—in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa—gives them an additional advantage. The United States has traditionally been superior in sea power, but the Soviet Union is rapidly closing the gap there as well.
These facts paint an ominous picture for the West.
Nations tend to favor those instruments they excel at, and the Soviets favor military force as an instrument of policy. Not only Russians but communists in general have consistently stressed the overwhelming importance of military might. Mao Zedong declared long ago that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” He also commented that “politics is war without bloodshed; war is politics with bloodshed.” Khrushchev defined his policy as “Only force—only the disorientation of the enemy. We can’t say aloud that we are carrying out our policy from a position of strength, but that’s the way it must be.”
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In considering the military balance between East and West it is important to remember that the two sides arm for different purposes. The Soviets have been engaged in a determined arms race because they want strategic superiority over the United States, and every year their effort has continued to increase. Our effort has not kept pace. It has, in fact, declined. In the 1960s the United States deliberately adopted the McNamara doctrine of self-restraint, which was intended to induce a reciprocal Soviet restraint and lead to arms limitation agreements that would benefit both sides. Instead, the Soviets have taken advantage of it to further their own drive for superiority. The Soviets have raced, and the United States has not; the result has been a rapid change in strategic balance virtually unprecedented in history. Not only have the efforts of the two sides differed, but so have their views of the nature of the competition. In the West arms are maintained as a necessity of defense; in the East arms are maintained to achieve the expansion of Soviet power. So the “arms race” is not a race between two contenders with the same goal. It is now more nearly akin to the race between hunter and hunted. If the hunted wins, both live; if the hunter wins, only one lives.
This imbalance of intentions affects the balance of power. It gives the Soviets the aggressor’s edge. The aggressor chooses the time and place of combat, whether in the jungles of Vietnam, a strike into central Europe, or an intercontinental nuclear exchange. We have to offset this aggressor’s edge by effective deterrence, whether by the superiority of our forces or by the skill and determination with which we use them. To create an equilibrium in the conflict—to preserve our safety—we need either more power to offset their inherent advantage or clear evidence that our will to use our power to defend our interests is equal to theirs. This is the context in which we should consider the strategic balance.
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For a quarter of a century American nuclear superiority kept the peace. Now that superiority is gone, and if present trends continue, the Soviets will have strategic nuclear superiority by the mid-eighties.
What is superiority? In our hands it was the safety margin that ensured that the Soviets would not risk a nuclear exchange in pursuing their goal of world domination. In Soviet hands it becomes the margin that enables them to proceed with local aggression without expecting a massive nuclear response. It also enables them to contemplate the final act in their drive toward world domination: a first strike against U.S. military targets that eliminates our capacity to respond with a counterstrike that would effectively neutralize their second-strike capability. This would then leave them in position to deliver the ultimate ultimatum: Surrender or be obliterated.
In 1972 SALT I, with the Jackson Amendment, established parity—in other words, equivalence—as U.S. policy. Parity is an uneasy condition; because of the aggressor’s edge, as long as we live in a situation of parity, we live with risk. But parity is infinitely better than inferiority, and parity is something about which negotiators can negotiate. Mutually beneficial arms restraints between the two major powers can only be agreed upon on a basis of parity. Strategic parity is a situation we can live safely with—but only if it is true parity and only if we also have sufficient strength in theater nuclear weapons, if we have strong conventional forces, if we show will and skill in the use of our power, and if we successfully link things the Soviets want in the military and economic spheres with things we want in the political sphere, most particularly with curbs on Soviet adventuring. While superiority would be preferable, with those conditions, strategic parity is acceptable, but only with those conditions.
By parity, I do not mean some arbitrary and minimum “assured destruction” capability. Parity does not mean accepting wide divergencies between U.S. and Soviet capabilities. It means that our strategic forces must be sufficient for the tasks and purposes we set, and also that they must not be inferior to the forces of the Soviet Union. Parity means that the Soviets have no advantages that are not offset by U.S. advantages; no capabilities that they could expect to exploit against us either militarily or politically.
In military terms, this means that the Soviet Union must not have the capability to win a war against the United States. In political terms, it means that the Soviet leaders should not think that in a confrontation they would have a strategic nuclear advantage over the United States—and neither should the leaders of any other nation believe that the Soviets would have that advantage.
It is essential that the United States have, and be seen to have, at least as much flexibility and sophistication in our forces as the Soviets have in theirs—in addition to having simply as much weight, or as many total warheads, or as many missile launchers. In order to deal effectively with the Soviet strategic nuclear f
orces of the future, we will require retaliatory forces in sufficient numbers and with sufficient types of weapons to survive a well-executed surprise attack on them, and then to carry out their assigned retaliatory mission in a way that will control escalation, rather than cause it. That means they must be able to penetrate Soviet defenses and destroy military targets in the U.S.S.R., with enough survivable reserve forces to constitute an adequate remaining deterrent.
With parity so defined, the Russians are not likely to launch a first strike on the United States, and they are not likely to engage in the sort of overt aggression that would be calculated to trigger a strategic nuclear response. Strategic parity gives us a good chance of keeping the nuclear genie in the bottle, and ensuring both sides that nuclear weapons will be used politically and diplomatically rather than militarily. But it does not create a risk-free environment; it does not relieve us of the necessity to maintain strong conventional and theater nuclear forces, able to preserve a local balance of power in each threatened area; it does not unburden us of the need to use power, or to deliver a credible threat to use it if challenged. The aggressor’s edge must be neutralized by the power and will of those threatened by aggressors.
Parity at the strategic nuclear level makes it even more imperative that we substantially increase our general-purpose forces and improve our regional capabilities. In the past U.S. nuclear superiority compensated for regional imbalances in conventional forces. When the United States had nuclear superiority Soviet leaders had to be concerned that hostilities anywhere in the world might lead to the use of American strategic power against the Soviet Union. But strategic parity magnifies the significance of any regional Soviet superiority in conventional and tactical nuclear forces, thus increasing the threat to the security of that region.
Within an overall framework of strategic parity, the usual play and counterplay of force and diplomacy goes forward on other levels. Parity can be sufficient if we are strong enough in other areas—theater nuclear forces, conventional forces, the strength and cohesion of our alliances, the will and skill of our leaders—to check Soviet adventuring without holding a strategic advantage. If we fail in these other areas, then parity will no longer be sufficient; then we will have to resume an all-out arms race, and go all out to win. Otherwise we will lose.
From U.S. Nuclear Superiority to Parity
In the period immediately after World War II the United States engaged in a process of hasty unilateral disarmament. From 1945 to 1947 we reduced our conventional forces from 14.5 million to 1.8 million. This policy was justified in part because of our monopoly on atomic weapons.
We learned in Korea that atomic weapons are not enough to deter war waged with conventional weapons. The Korean War, and what it signified about the global designs of the Soviet Union, shocked the United States into building up both our conventional and our nuclear forces and establishing a global system of bases surrounding the Soviet Union. The Soviets still maintained far larger land armies, and in 1949 they had exploded their own atomic bomb. They lacked an intercontinental delivery system, however, and the vigorous United States effort enabled us to maintain unquestioned superiority in nuclear forces and the capability of projecting our power to any area of the world where our interests were affected. Until the early 1970s no one questioned that the United States was the most powerful nation in the world. The existence of this U.S. power deterred overt aggression and forced the communists to go under borders rather than over them.
Because of this superiority the United States was able to deter Soviet intervention in the Berlin crisis in 1948-1949, in the Mideast war in 1956, and in Lebanon in 1958, where local U.S. naval superiority also played a critical role. In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the 15-to-l U.S. advantage over the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons enabled Kennedy to face down Khrushchev.
By that time a Soviet nuclear buildup was under way; it was sharply accelerated after Cuba. Vasili Kuznetsov, the Soviet First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, told his American host, John McCloy, “You Americans will never be able to do this to us again.”
In spite of the threat of Soviet nuclear buildup, our own programs leveled off. As recently described by a former CIA analyst, “The U.S. approach under Secretary of Defense McNamara was one of unilateral restraint.”
In 1965 McNamara gave this justification for restraint: “The Soviets have decided that they have lost the quantitative race. . . . There is no indication that the Soviets are seeking to develop a strategic nuclear force as large as ours.” This was a massive, tragic miscalculation. It was compounded by what Dr. Fred C. Iklé, the former head of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, has described as a “massive intelligence failure.” For eleven years during the sixties and early seventies the annual United States intelligence forecast grossly underestimated the number of offensive missiles the Soviet Union would deploy, as well as their entire strategic nuclear force effort.
The increase of Soviet military power vis-à-vis that of the United States is illustrated by a comparison of defense expenditures. The CIA has estimated Soviet defense expenditures over the last decade at 11 to 12 percent of GNP; other authoritative estimates place the Soviet defense effort in the 1970s in the 14-15 percent range, with reputable estimates of planned spending in 1980 reaching 18 percent of GNP. These higher figures are doubly sobering because of the past CIA tendency to underestimate rather than overestimate. By contrast, the United States defense budget declined from 9 percent of GNP in 1968 to 5 percent in 1978. Over the last ten years U.S. expenditures for defense in constant dollars (discounted for inflation) have fallen by a third, while the Soviet Union has continued its steady increase year after year. Between 1973 and 1978 it has been estimated that the Soviet Union spent nearly $100 billion more than the United States on arms procurement and construction, and an additional $40 billion more than we did on arms research and development. The problem is not only the greatest peacetime military buildup since Hitler’s in the 1930s, but also a massive U.S. build-down. As Secretary Harold Brown put it in the 1980 Defense Department Report:
As our defense budgets have risen, the Soviets have increased their defense budget. As our defense budgets have gone down, their defense budgets have increased again. As U.S. forces in Western Europe declined during the latter part of the 60’s, Soviet deployments in Eastern Europe expanded.
As U.S. theater nuclear forces stabilized, Soviet peripheral attack and theater nuclear forces increased. As the U.S. Navy went down in numbers, the Soviet Navy went up. . . . It is worth noting, moreover, that the growth in their defense effort has correlated quite closely with the overall growth of the Soviet economy, while the U.S. military effort has steadily shrunk as a fraction of our economy.
It used to be fashionable to claim that the Soviets only wanted to catch up with us. But in 1971 they caught up with the United States in total expenditures, and over the past half decade they have outspent us by three times in strategic nuclear forces and by at least 75 percent in general-purpose forces. Since personnel and operations costs account for only about 30 percent of the Soviet military budget, compared to 60 percent for the United States, that differential is magnified when it comes to military hardware.
Looking at conventional armaments only, we now find that they have more major surface combat ships than the United States has, and twice the number of attack submarines, as well as a fleet of 70 potent cruise missile submarines—of which we have none. They recently launched a nuclear submarine that goes faster (40 knots) and dives deeper (more than 2000 feet) than anything the United States has. They also have more than twice as many men under arms as we have, and four times the number of artillery pieces. We produce 40 heavy and medium tanks a month; they produce 50 a week. In terms of strategic nuclear forces, the CIA estimated in 1978 that Soviet expenditures, exclusive of research, development, testing, and evaluation, were three times those of the United States, and had been two and a half times those of the United States for the past
ten years.
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Since the mid-1960s, when McNamara initiated his policy of unilateral restraint, we have not been seriously competitive with the Soviets in the development of strategic forces. Since that time seven new types of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) have been put into service: three prior to the first strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT) and four since 1972, under the SALT I Interim Agreement. And yet a fifth generation of new Soviet ICBMs is under development. Also since the mid-1960s the Soviets have deployed four new types of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), three of them since 1972, three new types of strategic submarines, and the new long-range supersonic Backfire bomber, which is similar in many respects to the canceled American B-1, and three-fourths its weight. In the United States we have put only one new ICBM and two new SLBM strategic weapon systems into production since the mid-1960s: the Minuteman III ICBM, the Poseidon missile, and the Trident I missile, which is only now coming on line. Otherwise, we have stayed with the B-52 bombers of the 1950s and early 1960s, some of which are older than the pilots who fly them, and with ICBMs that reflect the design and deployment decisions of the early 1960s. We have canceled the B-1 bomber, deferred deployment of the new MX ICBM by at least three years, and slowed production of our Trident submarines.
From a position of unquestioned superiority in the early 1960s we have declined to what is at best a position of parity, and we face decisive Soviet superiority by the mid-1980s. This requires us to rethink the fundamental assumptions that lie behind the American notion of deterrence. We are now forced to think the unthinkable.
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