This entry is a subentry of Arms Race.
The United States, with Britain, developed atomic weapons during World War II and used them as a means to force Japan's early surrender. The first (and so far last) use of these weapons in hostilities came in August 1945 with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By then the seeds of the Cold War were being sown as the two superpowers argued about the political reconstruction of postwar Europe. If the United States hoped that the Soviet Union would be sufficiently impressed by the destructive potential of a single bomb to become more conciliatory in its foreign policy, it was soon disappointed. Josef Stalin recognized that troops on the ground would determine the distribution of political influence in Europe and Asia, and he acted accordingly. By the time of Hiroshima he was already well informed about the American nuclear program, from sympathizers working within it, and he pushed forward with a Soviet program.
Suspicions between the two superpowers were too great for significant cooperation to prevent a nuclear arms race. They defeated an American scheme to place nuclear energy under international control (known as the “Baruch Plan”), presented to the United Nations in 1946. As the Cold War intensified, the manufacture of American atomic bombs increased. In August 1949, far earlier than expected, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic device. From then on the United States could not escape the sensation of being in some sort of race, and this sensation influenced all decisions. The course of the nuclear age was no longer simply a matter of Western decision.
The first effect of the new situation was the decision to move from atomic weapons, based on nuclear fission, to hydrogen weapons, based on fusion. There were no obvious limits to the destructive capacity of thermonuclear weapons. Fearful of an inexorable march toward weapons and strategies of mass destruction, many of the most influential atomic scientists opposed their development. President Harry S. Truman overruled them, for now he could not be sure that Stalin would match any American restraint. In the event the first successful Soviet test of an H‐bomb came not long after the first American test.
This did not mean that the Truman administration was convinced that nuclear weapons could play a domineering role in national strategy. Though the United States was on the verge of virtual mass production of nuclear weapons, when the Korean War started in June 1950, stocks were still small and were not used in this conflict. The Truman administration saw nuclear superiority as a diminishing asset, for the Soviet Union would inevitably catch up. For this reason, with the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), it set in motion a program of conventional rearmament.
This proved to be too expensive to implement completely. In January 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced what became known as the doctrine of massive retaliation. Dulles did not believe it was either feasible or desirable to develop local forces to counter Communist aggression at any of the many points where it might occur. He therefore argued the need to “depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing,” implying nuclear attacks against Soviet cities.
The basic idea was to counter perceived Soviet advantages in conventional forces with American nuclear superiority, at least so long as it lasted. A couple of years later, Americans had good reason to believe that the period of their superiority was drawing abruptly to a close. Until now the United States had deployed its nuclear weapons on its powerful bomber force, to the point where the commitment of the USAF to the manned bomber had held back the development of long‐range missiles. The Soviet Union had adopted a different approach, putting few resources into bombers and concentrating instead on missiles. In June 1957, it tested the first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), but its program gained American attention with the world's first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik 1, launched in October 1957. This punctured American self‐confidence in its technological advantages. For a while there was panic (from which President Dwight D. Eisenhower remained commendably immune) as alarms were raised about an impending “missile gap.” Now the Americans no longer had the luxury of wondering how to exploit their superiority, but the worry of what the Russians might do with theirs. In the event, and despite some embarrassing failures in tests, the American missile program surged ahead of the Russian (which was based on cumbersome designs) so that by the start of the Kennedy administration in 1961, the “gap” was in the other direction, with U.S. superiority.
John F. Kennedy, and his energetic secretary of defense, Robert S. McNamara, wished to back away from the doctrine of massive retaliation. They were reinforced in this view by their experience of the two most dangerous crises in the nuclear age. For some time the Soviet Union had been putting pressure on the West to abandon the outpost of West Berlin, situated in the East German heartland and a constant source of aggravation, as it was used as an escape route by disaffected East Germans. Kennedy resisted this pressure. In August 1961, a wall was constructed, dividing Berlin. While causing outrage in the West, it also eased the immediate crisis caused by the flow of refugees. The next year the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba led Kennedy to risk war by demanding their removal. After a tense week, the Russians backed down. Both sides were now deeply aware of the dangers of nuclear confrontation.
However, it was not so easy to reduce NATO's dependence on nuclear deterrence. As part of the earlier attempt to match Warsaw Pact conventional strength, West Germany had been allowed to rearm. Germany had no intention of joining NATO in order to provide a battleground, so it required that its territory be defended at the East German border. If this could not be achieved through a conventional defense, then the task would fall to nuclear deterrence. The prospect now loomed of Armageddon being triggered by any Warsaw Pact incursion from East to West Germany. American strategy was torn between an unaffordable conventional defense and an incredible nuclear deterrent.
Eventually a compromise was reached in the form of NATO's doctrine of flexible response. The basic idea was that the alliance should not move immediately to nuclear use but would do so if Soviet aggression could not be stopped by conventional military or political means. Before large‐scale nuclear exchanges would be tried, it was envisaged that “tactical” nuclear weapons would be employed first.
Small nuclear weapons for battlefield use had been introduced during the 1950s and integrated with NATO's general purpose forces. At the time they represented an area of Western superiority, while the Soviet Union caught up with strategic weapons. It was hoped that concentrated enemy invasion forces would provide lucrative targets, but it soon became apparent that the same weapons could also help a Communist offense blast a way through NATO defenses. Nor would they be used “as if” they were merely hyperefficient conventional firepower. Exercises in the mid‐1950s indicated that use on a substantial scale by NATO alone would cause enormous casualties among the population supposedly being defended. Later efforts by weapons' designers to reduce the collateral damage with more “tailored” munitions did not get round this problem. The main consequence would be as likely to start the processes of nuclear escalation a little earlier rather than restrict them to a limited level.
Winning a nuclear war would require disarming the enemy in a surprise, preemptive attack, destroying as much as possible of his means of retaliation on the ground, and intercepting any bombers or missiles that escaped before they reached their targets. The ability to execute such an attack was described as a first‐strike capability; the capacity to absorb such an attack and then retaliate, a second‐strike capability. A first strike would be the most demanding task ever to face a military planner. A first strike would fail if critical targets were not located or were not attacked effectively or if enemy missiles were launched on warning of an impending attack. Defenses might be able to cope with a limited second strike, but they would soon be overwhelmed by anything substantial. At all stages the devastating power of individual nuclear weapons left little room for a margin of error.
The development of the first submarine‐launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) in the late 1950s in the American Polaris program effectively defeated the first‐strike concept. Submarines remained difficult to spot, track, and destroy. Even with advances in antisubmarine warfare systems, the increased range of the missiles meant that submarines could choose their patrol areas to maximize the problems faced by any attacker. By the end of the 1960s, the invention of multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs), a technique by which a large number of warheads could be put on top of a single missile, multiplied the problems that would be faced by ballistic‐missile defenses.
The fear that the other side might obtain a first‐strike capability, as much as a push for a national capability, began to drive the arms race. Instead of a competition to accumulate raw destructive power, national capability was now seen to be largely technological in nature, and geared to gaining a decisive strategic advantage. Not only did this lead to constant and expensive innovation in weapons design and force structures; with both sides trying to anticipate each other's next moves, this could lead to them both fearing an imminent surprise attack in a crisis. As it became evident that neither side could achieve a first‐strike capability, it became possible to think in terms of a stable nuclear balance. McNamara described the essential objective for U.S. strategic forces to be an assured destruction capability, which would leave no doubt that the result of a nuclear war would be the elimination of the enemy as a twentieth‐century society. This set limits on the force levels required and the type of forces required. To achieve stability, both sides would need to follow the same approach, creating a condition of mutual assured destruction—which inevitably became known as MAD.
The situation was recognized through the strategic arms limitation talks, which began between the Soviet Union and the United States in November 1969 and produced agreements in May 1972. The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) of 1972 froze the number of missiles at current levels—at the time some 1,700 for the United States, but some 2,300 for the Soviet Union, which had been engaged in a major buildup in ICBMs since the mid‐1960s and was beginning to overtake the United States in SLBMs. While these raw numbers did not recognize American technological advantages (and did not include the U.S. bomber fleet), they created a damaging impression that the process favored Moscow. This dogged efforts to conclude a second SALT agreement, and even when one was agreed in 1979, it was never ratified by the U.S. Senate because of a revival in Cold War tensions (and in particular the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). President Ronald Reagan was more ambitious, renaming the negotiations the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START). They did not produce the dramatic cuts he sought until the Cold War was over.
In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev had also signed the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which imposed strict limits on the number of defensive systems either side could deploy (no more than 100 launchers). In 1983, President Reagan appeared prepared to challenge the logic of this treaty when he launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), to provide a shield against a nuclear attack. The technological problem he posed was not solved. As important was the president's view of SDI as an alternative to dependence on nuclear deterrence. Would it not be better, he asked, to “protect than to avenge.” Unfortunately, SDI could also appear as an attempt to develop a first‐strike capability and so a likely result was just another round in the arms race.
SDI was another symptom of a growing unease with the condition of mutual assured destruction. For the same reason, there was also an exploration of the possibilities of partial first strikes. One proposal was to aim for the enemy's political and military command and control centers in so‐called decapitation attacks, in the hope that leaderless forces would not launch their weapons. Assuming that such an attack could be executed, there would be risks of leaving the other side leaderless. With whom would it then be possible to negotiate an end to the war?
Another idea was to attack only land‐based missiles in a counterforce attack, in the hope that it would remove the most formidable part of the enemy arsenal with minimal civilian damage. However, such attacks would still cause massive civilian damage and so stimulate a ferocious retaliation. Furthermore, technological developments were improving bombers, cruise missiles, and SLBMs, so that even if ICBMs were lost, powerful and versatile forces would remain. Cruise missiles were pilotless aircraft, the descendants of the German V‐1, suddenly rendered more potent by developments in engine design, miniaturization, and precision guidance.
The currency given to ideas such as these during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States reflected a fear that the Soviet Union had never accepted MAD and was seeking a real nuclear superiority. This was a particular problem given that it was the West that was most dependent upon a credible nuclear strategy, as a means of countering the perceived strength of the Soviet conventional forces facing NATO. Certainly Soviet thinking appeared to be based on the possibility of using the conventional phase of a war in Europe in order to prepare the basis (for example, by destroying NATO nuclear assets) for a decisive nuclear strike. The risk to the Soviet homeland (but not that of other members of the Warsaw Pact) would be limited by seeking an implicit deal by which the territories of both superpowers could be established as sanctuaries. If it looked as if the United States was preparing to strike at the Soviet Union, then Soviet doctrine would argue for a preemptive attack in order to limit the damage.
Soviet ideas for a “winnable” nuclear war were no more practicable than American, but they nonetheless prompted a Western response. The countervailing strategy was designed to deny the Soviet Union confidence that at any point in the ladder of escalation from crisis to all‐out nuclear war, it could expect to so dominate the fighting that it would force NATO to surrender. In line with this, intermediate‐range nuclear forces, including cruise missiles, were introduced into Europe. These stimulated powerful protest movements in Western Europe before their deployment began in 1983. However, not long after this, reformer Mikhail Gorbachev achieved dominance. Alarmed by the expense of the arms race, and anxious to improve relations with the West, Gorbachev in 1987 signed the INF (Intermediate‐range Nuclear Forces) Treaty with President Reagan, which eliminated this whole category of missiles, including Soviet SS‐20 missiles.
Two years later, in 1989, the Cold War was effectively over. By this time, both sides had over 10,000 strategic nuclear warheads. The political conditions were now propitious for more radical arms control. Moreover, with Russia now vulnerable to economic and political chaos, there was an incentive to decommission as many nuclear warheads as possible lest they become prone to accident or unauthorized use. By 1993, the START process was pointing to ceilings of 3,000 to 3,500 for each side. In 1997, further reductions of 1,000 were agreed. But by this time, the collapse in Russia's conventional strength meant that its parliament was reluctant to ratify such large cuts, and its military doctrine was moving to greater reliance upon nuclear threats.
The United States had become the most substantial conventional military power and had no need to resort to nuclear threats. For the same reason, potential enemies saw weapons of mass destruction as one of their few means of neutralizing this power. The United States was still unable to escape from the practice of deterrence.
[See also Cold War: External Course; Cuban Missile Crisis; Deterrence; Nuclear Weapons; SALT Treaties.]
Bibliography
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International Security 7:4 , Spring 1983. - Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits, 1984.
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