Real War

by Richard Nixon

  Feasible, cost-effective, and timely options exist for strengthening our strategic forces and reducing their vulnerabilities more rapidly than presently planned. All it takes is the determination to implement them.

  NATO and Other Theater Forces

  Because Europe and Japan are geographically close to the Soviet Union and vulnerable to attack by conventional forces with or without theater nuclear weapons, they have had to rely for their security on the U.S. “nuclear umbrella.” But now the Europeans and the Japanese see the spokes of that umbrella breaking, and they are questioning whether, if rain came, it would open.

  Our major military problem after World War II was to defend Japan, which we had disarmed, and Western Europe, which was vulnerable to massively superior Soviet conventional forces. In Europe we established NATO, which blocked the Soviet advance to the west. In Northeast Asia we sent conventional forces to Korea to stop the communist advance, and then we kept them there to protect South Korea and Japan as well. Our nuclear umbrella sheltered both NATO and Japan and compensated for our inferiority in conventional forces. The presence of our ground troops in Western Europe and Northeast Asia made clear the seriousness of our commitment to the defense of Europe and Japan, and acted as a tripwire for nuclear escalation that effectively discouraged aggressive Soviet actions.

  United States interests have not altered significantly since the close of World War II, but our ability to protect those interests has. Though geographically separated, Japan and Western Europe are two parts of one entity: that section of the industrialized democratic world that is threatened by Soviet military force. Both prospered under the protection America’s former nuclear superiority provided. Both are now increasingly vulnerable to military attack and to a crippling interdiction of supplies. Both are essential elements of the Western alliance.

  The Europeans will not be satisfied with general “indications” of American support, nor with “signals” of American strength, nor vague “assurances” from the State Department proclaiming strong transatlantic bonds. They will insist on a clear and steady show of American interest in maintaining the security and stability of Western Europe. We cannot afford to be fuzzy, for as Raymond Aron has commented, Europe can put up with an absurd and even an unjust situation, but it cannot put up with an ambiguous one. History has shown that the nations of Europe tend to gravitate toward a stable status quo, even if that stable situation is otherwise less favorable. They prefer it to the risks of instability. Thus they will demand a matching American move for every Soviet threat, or they will be tempted to seek accommodation with the Soviets.

  As West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt said in 1979, “Equilibrium is the main element underlying security. For many years now I have regarded balance of power as the indispensable precondition for peace and I now find that my conviction has been borne out.” If America does not ensure that equilibrium, if a failure of our will leads to an alteration in the balance favorable to the Soviets, then the European nations, as well as Japan, China, and countries like Saudi Arabia, will have every reason to fear and accommodate the Soviets. Such a trend would be our fault, and ours alone.

  • • •

  Before my trip to Moscow in 1959 Harold Macmillan, then the British Prime Minister, astutely commented to me, “Alliances are held together by fear, not by love.” Thirty years ago fear of the Soviets brought NATO into being and overwhelming American strategic nuclear superiority and allied statesmanship held it together. Today that superiority no longer exists; ironically, though, fear of a Soviet attack is less than it was when NATO was founded. But because the Soviet Union now has superiority in theater nuclear weapons and is rapidly moving into a position of superiority in strategic weapons, while at the same time maintaining its massive advantage in conventional ground forces, the threat to NATO countries is infinitely greater today than it was twenty years ago. It must be met by a drastically revised military strategy.

  NATO has always been, essentially, a military alliance to deter the military threat to Western Europe posed by the Soviet Union. During the last three decades NATO’s success in responding with flexibility and determination to the growing and shifting threats has been very impressive. Recently, however, three basic conditions have changed so dramatically that NATO is challenged as never before.

  First, the new economic and monetary vulnerabilities of the industrial world have led many people to regard these as more urgent than the Soviet military threat. As a result, it has become more difficult to sustain public and financial support for the levels of military strength needed within NATO.

  Second, former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, by accepting the territorial division of Germany, seemed to lessen Soviet incentives to apply military pressures in NATO’s central sector. Although the Soviet military buildup in central Europe has continued, the Europeans do not feel as threatened by the Russians as they did before.

  Third, the growing Soviet strategic nuclear forces—and the resulting vulnerability of the United States to direct Soviet attack—have impaired the credibility of the American security guarantee to Western Europe. This is the central dilemma of NATO. The United States, in seeking to negotiate a stable nuclear balance, has had to moderate its security guarantee to Western Europe, which originally was based on American nuclear superiority. It is a dilemma for which neither America nor Europe can be blamed—and it is not likely we can completely escape from it. Still, the dilemma can be dealt with more effectively than it has been.

  • • •

  For over a decade the United States has tried to resolve the NATO dilemma by emphasizing conventional forces. With a stalwart conventional defense on the ground in Europe, it was reasoned, the Soviets would be deterred from invasion and prevented from brandishing their military prowess for political effect. To be effective, such a policy would require that any Soviet attack be non-nuclear and that NATO’s forward-deployed conventional forces be strong enough to hold against a Soviet conventional incursion, so that the Soviets would have to pay a very high price for the decision to break the peace in Europe.

  The Soviet military have a healthy respect for NATO’s capabilities. In recent years, however, they have built up and modernized their own forces in Europe to the point where they now field the largest and most powerful military machine the world has ever seen. Moreover, as the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Alexander M. Haig, has repeatedly warned, Warsaw Pact forces have acquired the ability to launch an attack without strategic warning. Senators Nunn and Bartlett reported to Congress in 1977 that “Soviet forces in Eastern Europe can initiate a conflict from a standing start.” The same report states that “As the Warsaw Pact capability to attack from a standing start grows relative to NATO’s defensive capacity, so does the likelihood that the Warsaw Pact would already be on the Rhine when the NATO decision is made to use tactical nuclear weapons.”

  Their geographical position gives the Warsaw forces an enormous military advantage. U.S. forces, which make up the bulk of NATO’s reinforcement strength, would have to be ferried either across an Atlantic Ocean full of Soviet submarines or above the Atlantic in an aluminum air bridge that might not prove sturdy enough to bear the weight of the traffic. A 1978 computer war game simulation by the Pentagon showed that the United States may not have enough airlift and sealift capacity to get our forces to battle before it is all over. In the exercise almost all our troops assigned to be flown to Europe got there, but many of the heavy weapons they needed were stranded in the United States. Also, within the simulated exercise’s first thirty days the army ran out of artillery shells, tank rounds, and several other important types of ammunition, partly because stocks in Europe drawn down to dangerously low levels during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War have never been adequately replenished. Studies have shown that some European armies would begin to run out of crucial supplies in days rather than weeks. In view of the massive numbers of Warsaw Pact and Soviet troops within striking distance o
f Western Europe and the Soviet emphasis on surprise and a rapid, full-scale offensive, there is a consensus that NATO’s conventional forces would not be sufficient to withstand an all-out Soviet attack, even if confined to conventional weapons.

  • • •

  Even if NATO were to restore the balance in conventional forces, there would remain the nagging question of the nuclear role in European deterrence—or in actual fighting, if deterrence should fail. What if NATO’s conventional defenses did hold against an attack by the U.S.S.R. and the Soviets found themselves stymied? Would they accept that stalemate as decisive? Would the political goals for which they had launched an invasion of Western Europe permit them to stop there? Or would they then, having gone so far, escalate to the theater nuclear level, calculating that the Americans would not launch a nuclear blow from the continental United States aimed at the Soviet Union itself? The Kremlin leaders at that time might well figure that we would not, for fear of a swift and certain Soviet counterblow, which would devastate the nerve center of America’s military might: our land-based ICBM force plus our submarines in port and our bombers at their bases. As former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger pointed out in a 1975 report to Congress, “the Warsaw Pact does not think of conventional and nuclear war as separate entities. Despite a recent trend to improve its conventional forces and to recognize that a conventional war in Europe need not escalate to nuclear war, the Warsaw Pact strategy, doctrine, and forces are still strongly oriented toward nuclear operations.”

  Even today Soviet military planning calls for the possible use of theater nuclear weapons in any war in Europe, limited to theater targets in Europe itself. Their SS-20 missile and Backfire bomber are entirely new theater nuclear systems with intercontinental capabilities, unmatched by anything in the arsenals of the West. Their improved battlefield nuclear rockets and their new attack aircraft that can carry nuclear armaments generally exceed in range, firepower, precision, and mobility the theater nuclear capabilities of NATO. The purpose of such weapons is to give Russia the nuclear upper hand in the European theater, in a situation in which U.S. strategic forces would be checkmated by the Soviets’ equal or superior intercontinental might. Moreover, Warsaw Pact forces have been extensively trained for operations in a nuclear environment.

  The Backfire bomber carries nuclear cruise and attack missiles and covers not only Western Europe but also the Atlantic approaches to the European continent. With refueling it can reach the United States. The SS-20 is a mobile missile and therefore virtually invulnerable. At the beginning of 1980 the Soviets had approximately two hundred SS-20s deployed, and they are adding them at a rate of one every week. Each SS-20 carries three very accurate MIRVed warheads, and its 3,000–4,000-mile range enables it to zero in on any target in Europe—from Norway to England to Gibraltar. The SS-20 can also be converted to a mobile intercontinental SS-16 missile, capable of reaching the United States, by simply adding a third stage to the two the SS-20 already possesses.

  NATO has nothing comparable to the SS-20 or the Backfire. The 108 single-warhead Pershing-2 missiles recently approved for deployment in the mid-1980s have only one-third the range of the SS-20s. If the Russians continue to deploy their new weapons at the present rate, NATO will be even farther behind than it is now in the mid-1980s—even after our new Pershings and cruise missiles are deployed. There is a clear and present need to step up the modernization of NATO’s theater and battlefield nuclear forces across the board.

  The effort to deploy the neutron warhead was a first, tentative step in this direction. That weapon would have been very effective against the huge Russian tank armies. But its main virtue was that it would have reduced the yield and the blast component of battlefield nuclear weapons, as well as the radioactivity problem; therefore, it would have very little effect on those not in the immediate area of its prompt radiation: its collateral damage effects would be minimal, so that political authorities would be more inclined to authorize its early use against invading tanks than they would the older and more damaging battlefield nuclear weapons now in NATO’s inventory. Its deployment would have increased the credibility of our deterrent and made war less likely.

  In any case, our government’s political handling of the neutron bomb issue was clumsy. We told our allies we would deploy it, they took steps to prepare their publics for its deployment, and then we pulled the rug out from under them by changing our minds and declining to deploy it. This about-face was a major cause of the lessened confidence we now enjoy among those who depend on us for their protection. The episode is one of the main reasons we now have to be so careful, and so thorough, in repairing and restoring the “seamless web” of American deterrence.

  • • •

  In the aftermath of the neutron bomb fiasco the most important principle in dealing with all theater nuclear issues—doctrine, design, deployment, and negotiation—must be the protection of allied unity. Without NATO unity, and the restoration of greater mutual confidence, the deployment of a modern theater nuclear force will probably be impossible. Certainly any force we manage to assemble under these conditions would not impress or deter the Soviets, either militarily or politically.

  The tentative alliance decision to go ahead with the deployment of the longer-range Pershing missile and the ground-launched cruise missile has political value to the extent that it represents an instance of alliance unity in the face of Soviet pressure. However, the deployment has been linked to arms control objectives, and this raises questions about its military merit. Some allies have been persuaded that the systems are needed; others see them as instruments of future arms control. This difference in perception is a potential source of alliance confusion that the Soviets can exploit.

  Modernization must take place on its own merits. If we rationalize a system even partly on the basis of its arms control negotiating value, we raise justifiable doubts not only about its military importance but also about our determination to go through with the program. The military situation in NATO must be improved before there are any major arms control agreements with the Warsaw Pact. If we enter into arms control agreements first, we run a serious risk—approaching certainty—that those agreements will merely reflect and help perpetuate the existing imbalance.

  • • •

  The most important matter to be resolved is not the technical question of which new weapon is the most cost effective, but rather the doctrinal division within the alliance. Some—mostly Europeans—see theater forces as a way to “give a signal” of readiness to escalate and as an automatic link to U.S. strategic forces; others—mostly Americans—see theater forces as a way to defend Europe, and at the same time to control and contain a war in Europe without necessitating a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.

  Ways must be found to reconcile these two concepts in accordance with the new realities of the strategic balance. The “European” concept plays down or ignores the fact that giving a political signal requires real military operational capabilities. Moreover, it presumes that U.S. strategic forces would immediately make up for any deficiencies in NATO theater forces. Yet the growing vulnerability of the U.S. land-based ICBM force, the proliferation of Soviet targets, and the limited growth expected in U.S. strategic force programs, together with the SALT constraints on American forces, mean that until these trends are reversed the ability of U.S.-based strategic nuclear systems to cover European military targets will continue to decrease.

  In the view of many Europeans, the “American” concept puts too much emphasis on limited nuclear warfare confined to Europe, which is anathema to Europeans, and not enough on the political necessity to maintain the strongest possible link to all American strategic systems. For this reason many American proposals to improve NATO’s theater nuclear forces—even to the extent necessary to carry out the “European” concept—appear to West Europeans to be evidence of U.S. readiness to consider a nuclear exchange in Europe without escalation to the strategic
level.

  Both sides should understand that the common and overriding goal is deterrence, both of an actual attack and of the ability of the Soviets to exploit the military situation politically. Deterrence strategies in a multinational alliance may never conform neatly to strategic military logic, but they cannot endure if they do not conform to reality. While the link to American strategic forces is not, and cannot be, as strong as in the past, it remains. The present degree of reliance on those forces, however, must be supplanted by a stronger in-theater defense. Deterrence of a Warsaw Pact attack aimed at seizing Western European territory must be based more on the ability to prevent the Soviets from achieving such an objective, and much less on the less credible threat of retaliation by American strategic forces. This is not American nuclear decoupling—in fact, battlefield and theater nuclear forces will remain predominantly American; nor is it merely an attempt to restrict nuclear conflict to Europe. Rather, it is an effort to strengthen deterrence.

  The United States and its European allies must work out the outlines of such a doctrine and the specifics of modernization in accordance with it, with a firm grasp of our common objectives but also of the reality of the strategic situation. Certain things can be agreed upon: While there must be some deemphasis of reliance on the American strategic force umbrella, there must be no decoupling. In compensation, the theater and battlefield part of the nuclear umbrella must be strengthened. A new forward defense strategy and doctrine must be fashioned to meet modern Warsaw Pact combined arms capabilities. The starting point is to recognize the true nature of Warsaw Pact doctrine. That doctrine is oriented toward defeating NATO’s defenses and rapidly seizing territory, using tactical nuclear and chemical as well as conventional weapons.