On 6 August 1945 a single atomic bomb (A-bomb) dropped from an American B-29 bomber, named Enola Gay after the pilot's mother, leveled the Japanese city of Hiroshima and killed well over 80,000 residents. Three days later a second bomb smashed Nagasaki, exterminating 60,000 inhabitants. Emperor Hirohito forced the Supreme War Council to allow the government to sue for peace. Although World War II ended in the convulsive birth of the atomic age, the fiery climax failed to validate the putative war-winning efficacy of "strategic bombing." On 8 August the Soviet Union had broken its neutrality in the Pacific and declared war against Japan. News that the Red Army was sweeping across Manchuria caused greater alarm in official Japan than the latest episodes in a relentless American aerial campaign that in previous months included the fire-bombing of Japanese cities at the cost of more than 300,000 lives.

President Harry S. Truman justified history's first use of an atomic weapon on the grounds of military necessity. By the middle of 1945 the United States had dismembered Japan's overseas empire, blockaded its home islands, and razed a total of 178 square miles in sixty-six cities targeted with incendiary bombs. Still, Japan had refused to meet the long-standing American demand for unconditional surrender, a stipulation reiterated in July 1945 at the Potsdam Conference of Allied chiefs of state. Thus, short of some deus ex machina, an American invasion of Japan proper seemed inescapable. Its advocates, the strategic planners of the U.S. Army, recognized that fatalistic and suicidal Japanese resistance would "make the invasion of their homeland a horrendously costly endeavor." The disputed estimates of potential U.S. Army and Marine Corps casualties have ranged from the tens of thousands to more than 500,000. These figures do not reflect the inevitably heavy naval losses to kamikaze and midget submarine suicide attacks. Truman understandably chose to seek a cheaper victory through the shock of atomic bombing.

Devastating though it was to Japan, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had more significance for the future than for ending World War II. By 1945 twentieth-century warfare had witnessed the introduction of several revolutionary weapons systems characterized by horrifying destructiveness—the machine gun, the tank, the strategic bomber, and the submarine—but none of these remotely approached the nuclear bomb in transforming strategy and diplomacy. In the nuclear age, for the first time in history, armies and navies were no longer the principal objects at immediate risk in warfare. With their soldiers untouched and still waiting to engage the enemy, nations now could be obliterated in their entirety—populations, cities, societies. In his magisterial book The American Way of War (1973), Russell Weigley observed, "A strong strategy of annihilation could now be so complete that the use of… atomic weapons could no longer serve 'for the object of war,' unless the object of war was to transform the enemy's country into a desert." After August 1945, it therefore became the prime objective of the statesmen of the great powers to repudiate Carl von Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is merely "a continuation of policy by other means." The "other means" no longer could include the unlimited warfare symbolized by the American Civil War and the eastern front of World War II.

Despite fundamentally opposed political philosophies and almost universal pessimistic expectation, the leaders of the United States and Soviet Union grimly and steadfastly refrained from using the ultimate weapons in their arsenals during the half century between Hiroshima and the sociopolitical implosion of the USSR in 1991. Time and again, Soviet and American heads of state substituted statecraft for warfare as they patched together agreements aimed at curtailing the enlargement of one another's stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Time and again, after seeming to establish a numerical ceiling, one or the other superpower—but usually the United States—would make an "end run" around the existing agreements with a technological breakthrough in delivery vehicles or nuclear warheads. Then the game began again. Amid mutual recriminations, Soviet and American negotiators stitched together another diplomatic limit governing the nature and quantity of weapons in their arsenals. The number grew to uncountable thousands, but not one nuclear weapon was ever actually launched at the opponent and detonated in anger.

The noted Cold War historian John L. Gaddis has described the Soviet-American era of nuclear restraint as "The Long Peace," and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has suggested that "nukes" be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Gaddis falls somewhat short of the mark, and Schlesinger seems facetious, but each was trying to encapsulate the magnitude of a phenomenal achievement, one without precedent and probably without sequel. The sobering reality is that in the 1990s nuclear strategy and diplomacy entered a new epoch, one in which the inexorable proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction" among second-and third-tier states posed unforeseen and highly complex challenges to the major powers' desire to avoid actual use of such weapons in combat.

The Futile Strategy of Atomic Monopoly

Historians today agree that ending World War II dominated the president's thinking in the summer of 1945. However, for many years "revisionists" contended that Truman's desire to practice what the scholar Gar Alperovitz aptly called "atomic diplomacy" strongly affected his decision to authorize the nuclear attack on Japan. According to this thesis, Truman sought to influence Soviet policy by dramatically proving that the United States possessed an unprecedentedly destructive weapon that American leaders were willing to use against an enemy. With one awesome stroke Truman could show his mettle as a tough warrior, end the war, depreciate the Soviet Union's claim to share in the occupation of Japan, and discourage Soviet communism's expansion into Europe and Asia. Overstated though it was, the Alperovitz thesis described one very real rationale for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, and Truman certainly anticipated that a great geopolitical advantage would accrue to the United States from its atomic monopoly. What he did not foresee was the vehement reaction of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, who interpreted the atomic bombing as an anti-Soviet action disruptive to the postwar balance of power. No matter how unrealistic it was in the first place, any lingering hope of Soviet-American harmony in the early postwar world was doomed on 6 August 1945.

In a radio address delivered the day Nagasaki was bombed, President Truman elaborated the fundamental tenet of his postwar nuclear policy. Because the atomic bomb "is too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world," he warned, "Great Britain and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal the secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction." It soon became obvious that in the minds of American policymakers, "control" connoted some kind of global inspection system.

At first, prospects for negotiating the international regulation of atomic weapons appeared deceptively bright. In December 1945 the foreign ministers of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union met in Moscow. They jointly proposed the creation of an atomic energy commission responsible to the United Nations Security Council, where a veto precluded any action abhorrent to one of the five permanent members. The guidelines for the proposed commission also included the inspections demanded by President Truman.

On 24 January 1946 the General Assembly voted unanimously to form the UN Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) precisely as envisioned by the three foreign ministers. In June the commission met to forge the machinery for controlling atomic weapons. The American delegate, Bernard Baruch, immediately derailed the negotiations by introducing the concept of an International Atomic Development Authority that would operate independently of the Security Council. This autonomous body would have the power to punish, possibly by atomic attack, any nation that violated its pledge not to construct nuclear weapons. In a single sentence that broke the Moscow agreement, Baruch tersely explained the American rejection of the Security Council as the ultimate punitive agency of the United Nations: "There must be no veto to protect those who violate their solemn agreements not to develop or use atomic energy for destructive purposes."

Baruch's astringent tone reflected the views of a president increasingly worried by the deterioration of American relations with the Soviet Union. During the spring of 1946 the Soviet Union and the United States had failed to agree about the admission of Soviet satellite states to the United Nations, the composition of the Security Council's military arm, and the future of Germany. Moreover, Truman was upset by Soviet penetration of Iran and Manchuria, the latter an area of historic interest to the United States. According to the official historians of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the president recalled the Manchurian crisis of 1931 and 1932, reasoning that if Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson had been able to threaten the use of force at that time, World War II would have been avoided. For all of these reasons, Truman decided that the veto rendered the Security Council impotent against any transgression by the Soviet Union.

By the middle of 1946 the Soviet Union had also shifted its position on the international regulation of nuclear weapons. Five days after Baruch spoke, the Soviet delegate, Andrei Gromyko, addressed the UN Atomic Energy Commission. Ignoring the American's remarks, Gromyko proposed a multilateral treaty binding the signatories to destroy "all stocks of atomic weapons whether in a finished or unfinished condition" within three months. The Russian made no provision for inspections to ensure compliance, thus rendering his proposal utterly unacceptable to an American president who refused to "throw away our gun until we are sure the rest of the world can't arm against us."

Truman was not the only senior American to favor the threatening metaphor of a gun. In September 1945, at a reception held during a London meeting of the foreign ministers of the United States, Soviet Union, and England, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes chided Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov, "If you don't cut all this stalling and let us get down to work, I am going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it." This crude sortie into atomic diplomacy led to what the historian Gregg Herkin has described as Molotov's "reverse atomic psychology." The durable old Bolshevik made several dismissive jokes of his own, the import of which was to let the United States know that Byrnes "could not use the threat of the bomb to gain political concessions from the Soviet Union."

As hope for the international control of atomic weapons waned at the United Nations, the Truman administration began to shape a coherent nationalistic nuclear policy. The domestic political impediments were formidable. Congress was demanding sharply reduced postwar military expenditures and rapid demobilization of all branches of the armed forces. The army, for example, shrank from more than eight million men to fewer than two million in nine months. In this postwar environment, Truman won approval only for establishment of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in March 1946 and a test of the effectiveness of atomic weapons against ships at Bikini atoll later in the year.

Watchful waiting characterized American foreign policy immediately after the failure of the Baruch plan. Then, beginning in February 1947, a series of crises swept the noncommunist world. Britain's announcement of its inability to continue to sustain anticommunist forces in Greece and Turkey elicited an immediate promise of aid from President Truman, the first formal step toward the policy of containment. For sixteen months international tension mounted; in June 1948 it reached a peak with a Soviet blockade of land routes to West Berlin.

American nuclear diplomacy during that year and a half focused more directly on Great Britain than on the Soviet Union. In highly secret wartime agreements, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with the approval of the Belgian government-inexile, had apportioned the rich Belgian Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo) uranium ore reserves to Britain and the United States on an equal basis. At Quebec, in 1943, they also had agreed that neither nation would use atomic weapons in war without the consent of the other. By mid-1947 policymakers in Washington viewed these two agreements as detrimental to the United States. In order to enlarge its nuclear arsenal, the United States needed more than half of the annual supply of the Congo's ore. To exercise full control over its own foreign and military policies, Washington had to eliminate London's voice in the use of atomic weapons. Britain finally agreed to these American demands in December 1947, receiving in exchange the promise of technical aid in the search for peaceful uses for atomic energy.

The military facet of Anglo-American nuclear interdependence manifested itself in the early weeks of the Berlin blockade (June 1948–May 1949), when the British permitted the newly autonomous U.S. Air Force to deploy to England three squadrons of B-29 bombers, which may have been modified to carry atomic bombs. This deployment was the first forward staging of American strategic airpower since World War II. It complemented the growing emphasis on military aviation within the United States, as evidenced by appointment of the aggressive General Curtis E. LeMay to head SAC, accelerated development of long-range atomic bombers, and agitation in Congress and the new Department of Defense for a seventy-combat-group air force. The American search for overseas air bases to encircle the Soviet Union and threaten it with nuclear attack began in earnest with the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949.

In August 1949 the Soviet Union successfully detonated an atomic bomb, ending the American nuclear monopoly fifteen years earlier than anticipated by Washington. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and members of the powerful Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy pleaded with President Truman to counter the Soviet technological surge by building a hydrogen bomb. The outgoing chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), David Lilienthal, openly expressed the fear of such scientists as J. Robert Oppenheimer that it was morally wrong for the United States to base its foreign policy on "a weapon of genocide." But other equally prominent scientists, notably the nuclear physicists Ernest O. Lawrence and Edward Teller, argued the Soviet Union would surely try to outflank the American preponderance in fission weapons by developing a fusion weapon, or H-bomb, as quickly as possible. The only way for the United States to retain overall predominance in nuclear weapons technology was through creation of the hydrogen bomb, which Truman ordered in January 1950. He simultaneously directed a thoroughgoing reassessment of American foreign and military policy by the State Department, Department of Defense, and National Security Council (NSC). By April, Paul Nitze of the State Department had written NSC 68, a blueprint for the future that Truman approved in September.

NSC 68 was a stark document whose authors attributed to Moscow a "fundamental design" of completely subverting or forcibly destroying the governments and societies of the non-Soviet world and replacing them with "an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin." Only the United States had the potential to thwart Russian expansionism and ultimately "foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system." But successful containment would require that America increase its own political, economic, and military power and aid its allies in strengthening themselves. To ensure maximum American strength, NSC 68 discouraged seeking a negotiated control of atomic energy because agreement "would result in a relatively greater disarmament of the United States than of the Soviet Union." Looking ahead to 1954, when the Soviet Union presumably would possess a substantial atomic stockpile of its own, NSC 68 postulated a time of maximum danger during which the Soviet Union could lay waste the British Isles, destroy the communications centers of western Europe, or devastate "certain vital centers of the United States and Canada."

This suspicious and bellicose attitude permeated the highest levels of the executive branch when the advent of the Korean War in June 1950 loosened congressional constraints on massive military expenditures. President Truman immediately sought and obtained supplemental appropriations for the defense budget. By 1952 he had nearly quadrupled annual military spending, which had averaged about $15 billion since 1946. Although the president allocated a great deal of the hugely expanded sum to Korea and the buildup of conventional forces for NATO, the increase also made possible an exponential enlargement of the American capacity to wage nuclear war.

Truman moved on several fronts. First, he accelerated production of a hydrogen bomb. In theory, H-bombs can have unlimited explosive power, and their deadly radiation effects vastly exceed those of atomic, or fission, bombs such as those unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Atomic Energy Commission successfully tested a fusion device on 1 November 1952. A viable hydrogen bomb was added to the American stockpile in 1956, a year after the Soviets had developed their own practicable H-bomb. The second most important item on President Truman's atomic agenda was multiplication of fission weapons. Discovery of rich uranium deposits in the American Southwest and construction of several plutonium-producing reactors contributed to this atomic proliferation, but the big breakthrough in sources came with the determination in 1951 that the amount of fissionable material required for a bomb could be cut in half by surrounding the nuclear core with a neutron shield. The new abundance of fissionable substances permitted a third advance, the creation of "tactical" nuclear weapons. General Omar N. Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had publicly advocated this step in October 1949. Speaking as a soldier challenging the congressional popularity of the Strategic Air Command, Bradley argued that wars were won on battlefields, not by destruction of cities and factories. If Soviet armies massed to invade western Europe, tactical nuclear weapons could devastate them. Only in that manner could the thin divisions of NATO defeat a numerically superior foe.

Bradley won the endorsement of key nuclear physicists and congressmen. By the fall of 1951, Representative Henry Jackson of Washington State, a member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was urging an annual expenditure of between $6 and $10 billion for tactical nuclear weapons. Under this pressure, the Atomic Energy Commission moved energetically. In March 1953 it exploded a fifteen-kiloton device amid simulated battlefield conditions. Two months earlier, at President Dwight D. Eisenhower's inaugural parade, the army had displayed a cannon capable of firing nuclear projectiles.

The Truman administration and Congress created many highly sophisticated delivery systems for new weapons. The very high-altitude, all-jet B-52 Stratofortress bomber with a range of 7,000 miles was beginning to take shape as the principal strategic aircraft of the future. As a stopgap measure, to replace the piston-driven B-29 strategic bomber of World War II, Truman acquired bases from America's allies for the intermediate-range, six-jet-engine Boeing B-47. Congress allotted funds for the first aircraft carrier capable of launching jet-powered nuclear bombers, the Forrestal-class supercarrier with a flight deck nearly 1,000 feet long. The Atomic Energy Commission and Westinghouse designed a reactor to fuel some of the new aircraft carriers, but nuclear propulsion of submarines had the navy's highest priority thanks to the unrelenting vigor of one naval officer, Hyman G. Rickover. In June 1952 the keel was laid for a nuclear-propelled prototype, the USS Nautilus (SSN-571). It would signal "underway on nuclear power" on 17 January 1955.

At a rapid pace, the U.S. Navy fashioned and deployed two distinct types of nuclear-fueled submarines. The "attack boat," or SSN, came first. It was intended for the classic submarine role of striking ships or other submarines with torpedoes. Five years after Truman left office, Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh E. Burke prodded Congress to fund the first nuclear-driven, ballistic-missile-launching submarine (SSBN). Armed with ballistic missiles of ever-increasing range—first Polaris (1,200 nautical miles), later Poseidon (2,500 nm), finally Trident (4,000 nm)—this truly revolutionary weapons system aimed warheads at cities and other targets deep inland. It guaranteed the navy a permanent place in the strategic or nuclear "triad" of weaponry intended to deter Soviet attacks on the United States, or to launch a devastating retaliatory strike if deterrence failed.

Truman did not intend these weapons for limited war, but of necessity he had to consider the employment of atomic weaponry in the darkest days of the Korean War. On 30 November 1950, as Chinese troops swept General Douglas MacArthur's vastly outnumbered soldiers and marines south from the Yalu River, the president held a press conference. In answering a question about possibly dropping the atomic bomb on North Korea or China, he said, "There has always been active consideration of its use." He immediately added, "I don't want to see it used. It is a terrible weapon, and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing to do with this military aggression." But the doomsday alarm had been sounded. John Hersey, author of the widely read book Hiroshima, wrote, "There were glaring headlines in Paris.… Big headlines in Finland gave the impression that MacArthur had already received the go-ahead. In Vienna, the story had the lead in all the morning papers except the Soviet army sheet."

A thoroughly aroused House of Commons dispatched Prime Minister Clement Attlee to Washington to determine exactly what Truman was contemplating. At an extended series of high-level meetings in early December, the president attempted to mollify the Briton with the prayer that "world conditions would never call for the use of the atomic bomb." But he would not categorically rule out use of the bomb if the UN position deteriorated radically and MacArthur was in danger of being driven off the Korean peninsula. As it was, the UN forces stemmed the tide and the front was gradually stabilized roughly along the thirty-eighth parallel of north latitude, the original dividing line between North and South Korea.

General MacArthur has been popularly condemned for advocating the use of atomic weapons, as indeed he did. In December 1952 he told his former protégé, president-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower, "I would have dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs." But contemplation of a nuclear war in Korea was widespread in Washington between 1950 and 1953. The Joint Chiefs of Staff fantasized about implanting a cordon sanitaire north of the Yalu River with cobalt 60, a highly radioactive residue derived from reprocessed plutonium. Always eager to be involved in a bombing campaign, General Curtis LeMay, head of SAC, thought his airmen were well qualified to drop nuclear bombs because of their "intimate knowledge" of atomic weaponry. He almost got his chance. According to the historian Stanley Sandler, B-36s armed with nuclear weapons were deployed to Okinawa in June 1952 to induce the Chinese to sign an armistice. Across town from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Representative Albert Gore, Sr., a member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, believed radiating a large strip of the Chinese-Korean border was "morally justifiable" since Korea had become "a meat grinder of American manhood." In the supercharged atmosphere of early Cold War Washington, there was abundant domestic support for a nuclear war in Korea. The "buck" stopped with the president, as Harry Truman said it always did.

The American commander in chief refrained from authorizing atomic warfare against Korea or China partly out of belief that the Korean War was a Soviet feint and that the real communist attack would come in Europe, in which case the United States would need all of its nearly 300 atomic warheads. Moreover, by using atomic weapons the United States could spark North Korean retaliation against Pusan or other South Korean cities with Soviet-supplied atomic bombs. British disapproval and the racist implications of again employing the ultimate weapon against an Asian people contributed to Truman's restraint. Atomic diplomacy also helped stay his hand. In the opinion of one veteran of the Korean War, the historian Stanley Weintraub, Truman realized that if the bomb were used in Korea without producing "decisive results, it would lose credibility as a Cold War deterrent." The president therefore accepted a stalemate in conventional warfare in Korea while simultaneously fathering what Atomic Energy Commission chairman Gordon Dean described in September 1952 as "a complete 'family' of atomic weapons, for use not only by strategic bombers, but also by ground support aircraft, armies, and navies."

A Strategy of Overkill

Dwight D. Eisenhower, who succeeded Truman in January 1953, warmly embraced this monstrous "family." The new Republican president's conservative economic advisers demanded a balanced budget, and reduction of swollen defense expenditures was an obvious step in that direction. Complementing this fiscal orthodoxy was Eisenhower's conviction that Soviet leaders hoped their military challenge would force the United States into what he called "an unbearable security burden leading to economic disaster.… Communist guns, in this sense, have been aiming at an economic target no less than a military target." He abandoned NSC 68's conception of a time of maximum danger and began planning a less costly strategy for the "long haul." Throughout his two terms (1953–1961), Eisenhower limited annual defense spending to about $40 billion. He sought to deter communist aggression with an array of nuclear weapons rather than a large army. His strategic mainstay was SAC, supplemented by the navy's carrierbased atomic bombers and its new fleet of submarines (SSBNs) armed with the Polaris ballistic missile. By the late 1950s, SAC was flying 1,500 intermediate-range B-47 jet bombers from domestic and foreign air bases, and the intercontinental B-52 heavy bomber became operational, the first of a final total of 500. If deterrence or tactical nuclear weapons failed to prevent a Red Army sweep through western Europe—or if the Soviet air force dropped nuclear bombs on the United States—Eisenhower would employ his strategic airpower to destroy Soviet Russia.

Until 1957, when the Soviet Union demonstrated its technological sophistication by launching the Sputnik satellite and an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with a range of about 3,500 nautical miles, American policymakers generally considered a Soviet ground attack upon western Europe the most likely form of overt aggression. To cope with a Red Army advance in Europe, or a communist military offensive anywhere else, the Eisenhower administration adopted an asymmetrical strategy. On 12 January 1954, in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stated that to meet communist aggression the United States would "depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing." This public pronouncement of the doctrine of "massive retaliation" capped an intensive high-level review of American strategy begun the previous May. As early as October 1953, Eisenhower had approved NSC 162/2, a paper attempting to reconcile deterrence with reduced defense spending. The solution, labeled the "New Look," was to equip U.S. troops in Europe with tactical nuclear weapons whose destructiveness would permit him to reduce "the big, expensive army he had inherited from Truman."

To preclude bankrupting the U.S. economy with military spending, Eisenhower planned to shrink the army from twenty to fourteen combat divisions by mid-1957. He would arm this leaner army with atomic artillery and short-range, airbreathing missiles carrying nuclear warheads. In February 1954 he induced Congress to amend the Atomic Energy Act to permit divulging information about operational characteristics of American nuclear weapons to NATO allies. By December 1954 he had persuaded NATO strategists to assume that tactical nuclear weapons would be used in any future conflict with the Red Army. American General Lauris Norstad, NATO's supreme commander, succinctly summarized the new strategy in January 1956. The threat to use tactical nuclear weapons would "link the lowest and highest levels of violence and reinforce the credibility of the Western deterrent."

Although the rhetoric of massive retaliation usually did not discriminate between geographic areas, Eisenhower did have a different plan to meet aggression beyond Europe and the Western Hemisphere. If a noncommunist Asian nation were attacked, he intended to place the primary burden of defense upon that country's ground troops. The U.S. Navy's fiercely mobile aircraft carriers could be rushed into the arena, and in extreme cases the marines might be landed for finite periods. Nuclear airpower conceivably might be brought to bear, but only selectively. As Secretary of State Dulles said in a news conference on 18 July 1956, "In the case of a brush-fire war, we need not drop atomic bombs over vast populated areas." It might suffice merely to vaporize key military and industrial installations.

Abstract bombast about massive retaliation notwithstanding, in only three instances did Eisenhower actually warn other governments that the United States was prepared to launch a nuclear attack if its demands were not met. In April 1953 the Korean armistice talks between the communist Chinese and Americans had bogged down over the question of exchanging prisoners of war. At Dulles's behest, neutral India cautioned China that if peace did not come soon, the United States would resort to nuclear warfare. The two sides quickly agreed on international supervision of the repatriation of captured troops. Shortly thereafter, as the French position in Indochina disintegrated, Washington warned Beijing that direct military intervention in support of the communist Vietminh would be met with an American atomic attack on China. Finally, on 20 March 1955, as the communist Chinese bombarded the Nationalist-held islands of Quemoy and Matsu, Dulles publicly speculated about possible American use of "new and powerful weapons of precision, which can utterly destroy military targets without endangering unrelated civilian centers." This foolhardy boast sent shivers around the world, especially throughout Asia, where national leaders recalled ruefully that the only atomic bombs dropped so far had fallen on an Asian people. Eisenhower, who was privately determined to defend the islands with nuclear weapons if necessary, gradually realized that he could not rattle the nuclear sword without arousing global apprehension. According to the scholar Gordon H. Chang, communist China's conciliation had contributed significantly to ending the crisis, but at the cost of Beijing's realization that it would have to build a nuclear force to counter modern-day American gunboat diplomacy in the western Pacific.

The Soviets at the same time were providing additional stimulus for American reconsideration of the doctrine of limited nuclear warfare. They had detonated a hydrogen device in August 1953, unveiled the intercontinental turboprop Bear bomber (Tu-95) in 1954, and displayed the all-jet, long-range Bison bomber (M-4) in 1955. That year they also added a functional hydrogen bomb to their arsenal. Eisenhower's response was to build an extensive radar network and multiply the air force's interceptor wings. But the successful Soviet test of an intercontinental ballistic missile in the summer of 1957, coupled with the October Sputnik satellite launch, made these defenses prematurely obsolescent. The United States suddenly was exposed to a potential Soviet thermonuclear delivery system against which existing countermeasures were powerless. For the first time, all-out nuclear war would inevitably entail widespread death and destruction within the United States. Since it was impossible to ensure that escalation could be avoided once nuclear weapons of any sort were used anywhere in the world, the threat to use them thereafter must be restricted to crises involving areas absolutely essential to the United States: noncommunist Europe and the Western Hemisphere.

The stage was set for a policy of containment resting on conventional forces that the next president would adopt under the slogan of "flexible response." But Eisenhower's reluctance to spend large sums on defense prevented him from rebuilding or enlarging the army. For the same reasons of fiscal prudence, he also steadfastly resisted public and congressional pressure to disperse SAC aircraft more widely, to begin a crash program of ballistic missile development, or to spend tens of billions of dollars on fallout shelters. In August 1958, when the Department of Defense and some scientists warned him that discontinuation of nuclear testing would endanger further evolution of American tactical nuclear weapons, Eisenhower overrode their objections and announced a moratorium on atmospheric testing.

The sophistication of American aviation technology made restraint possible. Beginning in August 1955, the United States regularly flew extremely high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft over the Soviet Union. Dubbed U-2s, these gliderlike jets soared above the reach of Soviet air defenses. They returned with photographs proving that the Soviet Union had not built a massive offensive nuclear striking force, despite the technological capacity to do so. The sluggishness of Soviet production permitted Eisenhower to proceed at a measured pace with deployment of ICBMs and intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), including the submarine-launched Polaris. Eisenhower also could accurately describe Democratic presidential candidate John Kennedy's alleged "missile gap" as a "fiction." What Eisenhower could not do was win Soviet acquiescence to any form of inspections. Negotiations in the United Nations for the limitation of nuclear armaments therefore remained deadlocked throughout his presidency.

At the Gates of Armageddon

President John F. Kennedy may have been perpetrating what one observer called a "pure election fraud," but it is more likely that as a candidate he decried the fictitious and nonexistent missile gap because he agreed with the militant representatives and senators in the Democratic Party who disliked Eisenhower's tightly controlled defense spending. In any event, upon becoming president in January 1961, Kennedy admitted that a gap in nuclear weapons indeed existed, but it was favorable to the United States. At that time the United States possessed at least 200 operational strategic missiles of varying range, while the Soviet Union probably had no more than sixteen. Despite this substantial nuclear advantage in missiles alone, in February 1961 Kennedy requested congressional permission to strengthen America's deterrent forces by accelerating the acquisition of second-generation, solid-propellant, land-based ICBMs and nuclear-powered submarines armed with longer-range Polaris ballistic missiles. In a clear reversal of Eisenhower's fiscal conservatism, Kennedy decided to "develop the force structure necessary to our military requirements without regard to arbitrary or predetermined budget ceilings."

The new president also reversed his predecessor by enlarging the nonnuclear, or conventional, forces of the United States. In the summer of 1961, Kennedy seized on Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's bellicosity about the American presence in Berlin to extract from Congress a $3.2 billion supplement to the defense budget. With these funds he increased the armed services by 300,000 men and sent 40,000 more troops to Europe. This deployment underscored Kennedy's commitment to "flexible response," a strategy resting largely on nonnuclear weaponry. He refined the electronic "fail-safe" devices designed to prevent accidental firing of tactical nuclear weapons, discouraged planning that envisioned the use of such weapons, and retarded their technological evolution. These restrictions hampered NATO, which remained numerically inferior to the Red Army, by denying to the alliance the equalizing potential of clean and extremely low-yield tactical nuclear weapons. Thus, massive retaliation remained the only real deterrent to a Soviet military thrust into western Europe; and as the Soviets enhanced their ability to devastate the United States in any strategic nuclear exchange, the ghoulish doctrine became increasingly less reassuring to the NATO countries and less credible to the Soviet Union.

One reason for the Soviet nuclear buildup of the 1960s was the ambiguity of American strategy. From the beginning of the Kennedy presidency, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara insisted on maintaining clear strategic nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. With Kennedy's concurrence, McNamara increased the number of American ICBMs from about 200 to 1,000, completed the construction of forty-one submarines carrying 656 Polaris missile launchers, oversaw the development of the multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV), and kept a large percentage of SAC B-52s in a constant state of alert. Some of these measures, notably the conversion to MIRVs, came late in the decade, but the trend was apparent in 1961. Equally obvious was the possibility that a huge increase in the American stockpile would create a "first strike" capability with which the United States could preemptively attack and destroy the Russian nuclear striking force, thus making Soviet retaliation largely ineffective if not altogether impossible. The Soviets had lived with fears of an American nuclear bombing offensive since 1945, but nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles were virtually impossible to intercept. Kennedy's multiplication of those weapons thus deepened old apprehensions. As if to allay suspicion, on 26 March 1961 the president promised, "Our arms will never be used to strike the first blow in any attack."

Despite Kennedy's reassurance that the United States would not strike first, Khrushchev announced in August 1961 that he was breaking the three-year-old moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere. Worried by the dangers of radioactive fallout, Kennedy at first resorted to underground testing. In April 1962 he resumed atmospheric testing in order to evaluate sophisticated new warheads and to prevent the Soviet Union from scoring a technological breakthrough that would eliminate the American nuclear superiority. Khrushchev then sought a cheap and quick adjustment to the strategic imbalance by placing 900-mile medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) in Cuba. He also hoped to enhance his fading image as a supporter of overseas communist regimes, especially Fidel Castro's Cuban dictatorship, thereby answering hard-liners in Moscow and Beijing who deplored his efforts to ease tensions with the West. In this manner, rein-vigoration of the strategic arms race in 1961 led to the Cold War's most dangerous nuclear war scare.

On 14 October 1962, American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft photographed the Cuban missile sites while they were still under construction. For one week the Kennedy administration debated its response, finally settling upon a naval "quarantine" of further shipments of offensive missiles. As he announced his decision to the world on 22 October, President Kennedy also warned that if ballistic missiles were launched from Cuba against any country in the Western Hemisphere, the United States would counter with a "full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." While massing troops in Florida for a possible invasion of Cuba, the president insisted that the Soviet Union remove the missiles already on the island. The face-off lasted for another week and was highlighted by an intense debate among the president's most senior advisers over whether to offer a contingent palliative to the Soviet Union: removal of the fifteen American Jupiter IRBMs based in Turkey. Obsolete by the time they became operational in 1962, the Jupiters already "were supposed to be replaced by submarinelaunched Polaris missiles." Moscow nonetheless found their presence on the southern Soviet border extremely provocative and destabilizing. Evan Thomas, a meticulous student of the administration, sums up the situation: "President Kennedy was not inalterably opposed to swapping the Jupiters, but he thought it would be foolish to publicly offer right away to trade them." His brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, therefore privately assured Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that once the Cuban crisis passed, the American missiles would be withdrawn. For the rest of his life, Robert Kennedy feared the political repercussions of his intervention. Dobrynin claimed Robert Kennedy told him that "some day—who knows?—he might run for president, and his prospects could be damaged if this secret deal about the missiles in Turkey were to come out." The dour Robert was as much a political animal as was his glamorous brother.

Khrushchev capitulated and removed the Soviet missiles from Cuba because he feared losing control of the situation. Castro was beseeching the Soviet leader to launch a nuclear attack to stave off an American invasion of Cuba. In Washington, President Kennedy was under equally extreme pressure to take military action. A post-crisis outburst by the air force chief of staff expressed the attitude of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Curtis LeMay, who had masterminded the firebombing of Japan and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shouted at the president: "We lost! We ought to just go in there today and knock 'em off." The president knew better. He had risked Armageddon because he regarded the Russian MRBMs as an unacceptable challenge to American strategic superiority and an immediate danger to the nation's security. The missiles were gone; he had achieved his strategic goal, and not incidentally thwarted Republican critics in a congressional election year. Most Americans probably agreed with him in 1962, but with the passage of time the ultimate gamble seems increasingly less defensible. "In retrospect," the strategic analyst Norman Friedman concluded soon after the Cold War ended, "it is difficult to understand why Soviet weapons in Cuba were worth a global war."

The Cuban missile crisis reverberated throughout the 1960s. The continental European members of NATO were shaken by the unilateral way in which the United States went to the brink of nuclear conflagration without consulting its allies. French President Charles de Gaulle reaffirmed his determination to reduce European economic and military dependence upon the United States. In January 1963 he vetoed British entry into the Common Market on the grounds that British membership would make the association "appear as a colossal Atlantic community under American domination and direction." Simultaneously he rejected Kennedy's plan for a multilateral nuclear force (MLF) as a transparent scheme to give the impression of multinational authority while in fact preserving the American veto over NATO's nuclear strategy. To end France's subservience to the United States, De Gaulle gradually immunized his military units from unquestioning subordination to the NATO command, and he ordered the removal of the alliance's headquarters from French soil as of April 1967. To document great power status in the nuclear age, he forged a French atomic striking force, the force de frappe. Britain at the same time was building its own strategic nuclear arsenal, but because of the special Anglo-American relationship it faced far fewer developmental obstacles. Kennedy simply provided the Royal Navy with Polaris missiles.

The impact of the missile crisis on Soviet-American relations was tragically paradoxical. On the one hand, the humiliating Soviet retreat strengthened the militants in the Kremlin who favored increased defense expenditures. They resolved that in the future the Soviet Union would deal with the United States as a nuclear equal. On the other hand, leaders in both countries were chastened by having faced nuclear annihilation. They installed a Teletype link, or "hot line," between the White House and the Kremlin to minimize misunderstanding during acute crises. Even in the midst of capitulating, on 29 October 1962, Khrushchev set the tone for further accommodation: "We should like to continue the exchange of views on the prohibition of atomic and thermonuclear weapons, general disarmament, and other problems relating to the relaxation of international tension." For some months Kennedy hesitated. Then, on 10 June 1963, in a speech at American University he made a passionate appeal for peace as "the necessary rational end of rational men." Coupled with various Anglo-American diplomatic initiatives, Kennedy's speech broke the impasse in superpower negotiations. Within weeks Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited testing nuclear weapons in outer space, in the atmosphere, or under water. The treaty fell short of Kennedy's original goal for a comprehensive test ban that would have preserved American technological superiority by slowing or preventing improvements to the Soviet arsenal. Nevertheless, the U.S. arms control and disarmament director, William C. Foster, reminded Congress that half a loaf was better than none. With the limited test ban, he said, "improvements in yield-to-weight ratios would come more slowly through laboratory work alone. Some weapons effects phenomena would remain unsettled or undiscovered by both sides.… In general, our present nuclear advantages would last for a considerably longer period." In September the Senate ratified the Limited Test Ban Treaty by a vote of 80 to 19.

A Mad, Mad World

Two months after Senate ratification of the treaty, on 22 November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The unspeakable tragedy abruptly ended any possibility of subsequent nuclear weapons agreements between himself and Khrushchev. The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was focused foremost on ramming through Congress the domestic reforms he advertised as the "Great Society." For continuity and simplicity he kept Kennedy's foreign policy and national security advisers in place, including Secretary of Defense McNamara.

McNamara continued to espouse a variant of the old Dulles doctrine of deterring a Soviet attack through the threat of massive retaliation, a strategic premise not wholly shared by Moscow's leaders. As the secretary of defense explained in his "posture statement" of January 1964, the United States was building a nuclear force of such superiority that it could "ensure the destruction, singly or in combination, of the Soviet Union, communist China, and the communist satellites as national societies." In addition, it could "destroy their war making capability so as to limit… damage to this country and its allies." The inconsistency of this statement is patent: there can be no need to destroy an enemy's nuclear arsenal if its entire nation has already been obliterated. But underlying what appeared to be a logical lapse was the dawning and extremely reluctant acknowledgment in Washington of the "difficulties of appreciably limiting damage to the United States and its allies." By 1964, as the strategic historian John Newhouse observed, "the recognition that the United States was in the autumn of its strategic supremacy had set in." The immediate upshot was an unresolved debate about whether nuclear missiles should be "counter-force" weapons targeted only against the Soviet Union's ICBMs and other military assets, or "counter-value" weapons targeted against major Soviet industrial centers and their populations.

A counter-force strategy was preferable for reasons of humanity if nothing else, but the possibility of a counter-value assault by a desperate nuclear power could never be altogether ruled out. The counter-value strategy enjoyed disconcertingly wide theoretical appeal. It lay firmly in the mainstream of the "strategic bombing" doctrines of the Italian theorist Guilio Douhet, who wrote approvingly in 1921, "A complete breakdown of the social structure cannot but take place in a country subjected to this kind of merciless pounding from the air." The army general William "Billy" Mitchell adapted Douhet to the American experience in the 1920s and 1930s, and in World War II the U.S. Army Air Forces had adopted these draconian concepts of annihilating the enemy and its urban-industrial infrastructure. The theories had helped to rationalize the decision to drop the first atomic bombs on Japan in 1945.

In this confused environment, both the United States and the Soviet Union began to design nuclear weapons and delivery systems that could withstand a nuclear first strike and mount a crushing retaliatory strike. The United States led in deployment of such innovative systems as hardened silos, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) of ever-increasing range, new generations of heavy bombers, and MIRVs (a MIRV consisted of several relatively small but highly accurate warheads atop a single ICBM, each destined for an independently preprogrammed target). Toward the end of the decade the ability to cripple the Soviet nuclear arsenal in a gargantuan strike seemed to be coming within America's reach. By 1968 the United States had deployed 1,054 ICBMs to the Soviets' 858, and the U.S. lead in the other indices of nuclear superiority was equally daunting.

Owing to this preponderance and to the enormous fiscal drain that the Vietnam War levied on defense resources, the pace of the United States buildup of strategic weapons actually began to level off at the height of the arms race in 1965. At the same time, the Soviet Union initiated a massive expansion of its strategic forces in an attempt to achieve parity with the United States. Finally conceding that the goal of limiting damage in a nuclear exchange had become unattainable, strategists in Washington began to use the term "assured destruction" in describing the standoff between the two nuclear powers. McNamara himself became convinced that neither further arms buildups nor the visionary antiballistic missile defense system (ABM) could guarantee Americans the security they craved. He began to search for a new formula for strategic stability. The answer was found in a 1946 book entitled The Absolute Weapon, in which America's preeminent strategist, Bernard Brodie, argued for nuclear equality between the United States and the Soviet Union. "Neither we nor the Russians," Brodie and his coauthors presciently wrote, "can expect to feel even reasonably safe unless an atomic attack by one were certain to unleash a devastating atomic counterattack by the other." McNamara now adopted this proposition, and it became enshrined in a telling acronym unfairly ascribed to him: MAD, for "mutual assured destruction." The converted secretary made it his mission to proselytize the American and Soviet leadership.

In 1967, U.S. leaders discovered that the Soviet Union was deploying a protective ABM system around Moscow. McNamara anxiously sought to avoid a reactionary massive increase in America's offensive nuclear forces. He persuaded President Johnson to bring up ABM defenses at the summit meeting with Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin in June 1967 at Glassboro, New Jersey. When Johnson was unable to convince Kosygin that antiballistic missile defenses would only trigger an offensive nuclear arms race, McNamara tried to explain the administration's reasoning to the prime minister. The secretary of defense described at length the action-reaction dynamic he foresaw if the Soviet Union persisted in deploying antimissile shields, and he insisted that the only way to prevent an endless arms race was to limit or even eliminate these embryonic protective systems. This reasoning infuriated Kosygin, who found the idea of abandoning defensive weapons in favor of offensive weapons to be irresponsible and immoral. His premises differed fundamentally from McNamara's. Like other Soviet leaders, Kosygin based his thinking on the cruel lessons of World War II, during which the Soviet Union suffered cataclysmic devastation at the hands of Hitler's invading armies. The imperative "never again" informed all Soviet military planning. For Kosygin, McNamara's proposal to abandon missile defenses was a direct invitation to a reprise of national disaster. Kerry Kartchner, an American disarmament negotiator, observed critically, "there is little evidence that McNamara took actual Soviet strategic thinking about nuclear weapons into account, either in determining what was required to deter Soviet leaders, or how the Soviet Union might react to American deployment of ABMs." McNamara also appeared hypocritical, because as spokesman for the Johnson administration he had testified before Congress in favor of a limited Sentinel ABM system intended to protect cities and ICBM silos from destruction in a Soviet nuclear attack.

By late 1967, McNamara's days in power were nearing their end. He and others within the Johnson administration were belatedly realizing that the parasitical war in Vietnam was unwinnable, and they soon faced incontrovertible evidence that their strategy for waging limited war had failed. The communist Vietnamese Tet offensive of January 1968 broke America's will to fight and precipitated McNamara's resignation as secretary of defense. It also induced Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the presidential race. In November, Republican Richard M. Nixon was elected president. He inherited only one undeniably positive nuclear policy achievement from the Johnson administration: the multilateral Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), signed by the Soviet Union and more than fifty other nations in 1968 and ratified by the United States in 1969.

The Nonproliferation Treaty set up a twotiered "regime" that divided the world into nuclear haves and have-nots. The United States, Soviet Union, France, Britain, and China were designated "nuclear weapons states" by virtue of the fact that they had tested nuclear weapons before 1968. All other parties to the treaty, officially designated as "non-nuclear weapon states," joined with the understanding that they would not seek to import or develop nuclear technology or materials for military purposes. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which had been founded by the United Nations in 1957, was given the task of verifying treaty compliance through an elaborate inventory procedure including on-site inspections at regular intervals. The five so-called weapons states were exempt from all such controls, but they were expected to honor the regime out of self-interest. Even so, France and China were dissatisfied and did not ratify the accord until 1992.

During the treaty negotiations, India led the nonaligned states in opposing the treaty's codification of elite status for the weapons states. The principal sop that the five nuclear-armed signatories conceded to the nonnuclear weapons states was the provision to share nonweapon nuclear technology "in good faith." New Delhi strongly objected to the absence of a provision for the enforcement of this obligation. In the end, several important countries, including India, Pakistan, and Israel, refused to sign the treaty; they remained beyond negotiated global nuclear controls. Such a treaty was a thin reed of hope for nonproliferation, as Richard Nixon well knew.

A Cooperative Balance of Terror

Unscrupulous and devious in many ways, President Nixon was the consummate realist in foreign policy, especially when guided and prodded by his national security affairs adviser, the German émigré and former Harvard professor Henry A. Kissinger. Upon learning that the Soviets were rapidly approaching nuclear parity with the United States, the new president sensibly abandoned the quixotic search for American superiority in nuclear weapons systems and accepted the concept of parity or "sufficiency." He simultaneously made the decision to expand ABM defenses in the name of damage limitation, citing not only the danger from the Soviet Union but also from the People's Republic of China, which recently had joined the special weapons club by testing and deploying a nuclear weapon. Unlike Sentinel, however, the new Nixon Safeguard system was designed exclusively to protect Minuteman ICBM silos. The administration made public its decision that, in light of the Soviet Union's burgeoning offensive nuclear capability, limiting damage to civilian targets no longer was possible. The United States could only hope to preserve a retaliatory capability, the existence of which would deter an opponent from striking first. To further underscore his tough-mindedness and enhance the American retaliatory arsenal, Nixon installed more MIRVs on U.S. ICBMs.

Considering himself to be in a position of diplomatic strength, President Nixon entered into the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) negotiations with the Soviet Union in November 1969. The Soviets, for their part, were now willing to negotiate because they were drawing abreast of the United States in numbers of ICBMs, if not in MIRVed warheads. A rough de facto nuclear parity had been achieved, and each side sought to freeze it in order to avoid the astronomical expense of building elaborate ABM systems, which existing technology could not make fully effective. The cost of the Vietnam War was driving American fiscal prudence; the chronic inefficiency of the Soviet economy was inspiring Moscow's circumspection. The two sides, however, were unable to reach any agreement and the SALT I discussions dragged on until the spring of 1972.

Fruition came at a summit in Moscow on 26 May 1972, when the Soviet Union and the United States agreed by treaty to curtail deployment of ABMs. Delegates of the two superpowers also initialed a five-year interim agreement freezing offensive strategic nuclear weapons systems at their existing levels. In essence, the United States conceded to the Soviet Union an advantage in large missiles with horrifically destructive warheads, and the Soviet Union yielded to the United States the countervailing advantage in MIRVs. "What are 3,000 MIRVs among friends?" Henry Kissinger joked, but he later regretted that he had not pondered "the implications of a MIRVed world more thoughtfully."

The ABM Treaty likewise failed to prohibit further development of new delivery systems, such as the supersonic intercontinental B-1 bomber to replace the B-52, longer-range Trident SLBMs to replace the Polaris-Poseidon system, and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Maintenance of nuclear parity at the 1972 level, therefore, gave the United States the chance to capitalize on its technological supremacy to make an end run on the Soviets. With characteristic insight and cynicism, Kissinger quipped, "The way to use this freeze is for us to catch up." The Senate showed its appreciation for the advantages of the ABM Treaty by approving it with an overwhelming vote: 88 to 2. A joint congressional resolution endorsed the five-year moratorium on development of new offensive strategic nuclear weapons.

Nixon's acceptance of atomic equality did not deter him from relying on nuclear weapons in his conduct of foreign and military policy. For example, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, he authorized a full alert of American strategic forces to forestall intervention by Soviet airborne troops. Similarly, as he progressively reduced the size of the U.S. Army, he permitted his advisers to revive plans for using tactical, or battlefield, nuclear weapons. In January 1971, when speaking about the American defense posture from 1972 through 1976, Secretary of Defense Melvin B. Laird said: "For those levels in the deterrent spectrum below general nuclear war, the forces to deter Soviet and Chinese adventures clearly must have an adequate war-fighting capability, both in limited nuclear and conventional options."

Hoping to capitalize on the success of the ABM Treaty, Nixon ordered new negotiations with the Soviet Union. SALT II opened with promise in November 1972 but soon foundered for several reasons: the scandal of the Watergate burglary and the forced resignation of Nixon in August 1974, Soviet-American disagreements over technical issues, and the objections of militants like Senator Henry Jackson who cried for the restoration of nuclear superiority.

The Limits of DÉtente

The new president, Republican Gerald R. Ford, initially retained Kissinger as both secretary of state and national security affairs adviser, but the old diplomatic wizardry had dissipated. The secretary of state and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin met frequently and maneuvered endlessly for an advantage in arms control negotiations, warily proposing to limit weapons in which the other side had superiority while protecting their own favorites. In the interminable horse-trading, the United States claimed that the supersonic Soviet Backfire bomber (Tu-26) should be included in any new limitations agreements; the Soviets demanded inclusion of American nuclear-armed, ground-hugging, nonballistic cruise missiles. Technological strides kept raising the ante: the Soviet Union was perfecting the triple-MIRVed SS-20 IRBM, a terrifying threat to NATO; the United States was readying highly accurate Pershing IRBMs for NATO deployment and completing the Trident SSBN, with ballistic missiles that had a range of 4,000 nautical miles. Since neither side would yield, the dimming hopes for SALT II were bequeathed to the new Democratic administration of James Earl Carter in January 1977. When Carter took office, the U.S. nuclear inventory stood at 8,500 nuclear warheads in comparison with 5,700 in 1972, and the Soviet count had nearly doubled in the same period. If moderation of the nuclear balance of terror was the benchmark, the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente had failed miserably.

President Jimmy Carter thought détente was worse than a failure. He believed U.S. strategic potency actually had diminished under Republicans Nixon and Ford: "We've been outtraded in almost every instance." The Naval Academy graduate and former nuclear submariner was perpetually torn between the "mailed fist" of his hawkish national security affairs adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the "dove's coo" of his temperate and cautious secretary of state, Cyrus R. Vance. The president played off China against the Soviet Union, lectured Moscow on its policy toward Jews and dissident intellectuals, and at the same time tried to reignite the stalled SALT II talks. Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin lamented, "President Carter continued to attack us in public, in public, in public. Always in public."

Two months after Carter's inauguration, Secretary of State Vance flew to Moscow with a proposal to revive the SALT process by radically reducing the number of deployed ICBMs, not surprisingly the nuclear category in which the Soviets held the lead. Initially rebuffed, Vance persevered until Carter and Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty at a summit meeting in Vienna in June 1979. For the first time, each superpower accepted numerical equality with the other in total nuclear delivery vehicles. The total number of MIRVed launchers for each side was set at 1,200, and the quantity of MIRVs per missile was also fixed. Moscow and Washington promised to allow on-site verification of compliance by representatives from the other side, an unprecedented step forward. Excluded from the agreement were several new high-technology weapons systems: the American MX ("missile experimental"), an improved ICBM that could deliver ten MIRVs to targets 7,000 miles distant from the launch site; the Trident-II SLBM with MIRVed ballistic missiles almost twice the weight of their predecessors; the nonballistic, nuclear-armed cruise missile; and the supersonic Soviet Backfire bomber with a threatening range of 5,500 miles.

This qualified success fell victim to domestic critics and to Soviet-American disputes over hegemony throughout the world. Paul Nitze, the bellicose author of NSC 68, protested against SALT II. He said it was "time for the United States to stand up and not be a patsy." Senator Henry Jackson, always a patron of the arms industry and an intransigent foe of conciliation, complained that SALT II sanctified an imbalance in which the Soviet Union could destroy American land-based nuclear retaliatory forces in a preemptive first strike. In contrast, doves faulted the treaty because it was not comprehensive enough.

The objectors might have scuttled the pact regardless of international affairs, but in the fall of 1979 they were aided immeasurably by Carter's accusation that the Soviets were infiltrating a combat brigade into Cuba. The president vainly attempted to placate his critics and to warn the Soviets. He proclaimed a five-year military expansion program focused on European-based inter-mediate and cruise missiles, and his personal rage at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of that year led him to withdraw SALT II from the Senate. Discredited by a wide variety of foreign policy failures, most notably the Iranian hostage crisis (1979–1981), Carter lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, a charismatic movie actor and former governor of California.

Taming the Evil Empire

Pledging to "make America great again," President Reagan carried enough Republican candidates on his popular coattails to win control of the Senate for his party. Reelected by a landslide vote in 1984, he was superbly well positioned to maintain a contentious posture vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, which he denounced with ideological fervor as an "evil empire." He and a kaleidoscopically shifting cast of senior advisers perceived a mortal U.S. disadvantage in strategic armament. The deficit arose primarily from the Soviet Union's greater aggregate "throw-weight," that is, the sheer tonnage of destructive power its missiles could deliver to targets in the United States and NATO countries. This simplistic measure of relative capability was used by the Reagan administration to warn of a "window of vulnerability" through which the United States could be devastated by a preemptive Soviet first strike.

To redress the Soviet Union's ostensible "margin of superiority," Reagan instructed the Pentagon to disregard budgetary restrictions and request whatever weapons it wanted. He goaded Congress to fund accelerated development and deployment of the B-1 bomber, the neutron bomb, the B-2 "stealth bomber," the Trident-II SLBM, the MX and cruise missiles, and mobile Minuteman ICBM launching sites. Thus fortified, President Reagan, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and Secretary of Defense Caspar W. "Cap" Weinberger undertook arms-reduction talks with the Soviet Union. The Reagan cohort would extort Soviet concessions by using the revived arms race to strain the creaking Soviet economy.

The Reagan administration soon was managing several approaches to strategic security in the wake of the inherited SALT II failure: a rapid buildup of strategic and conventional capabilities; negotiations in 1981 to limit intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF); the opening of talks on a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) in 1982; and research into space-based antiballistic missile defenses. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), announced in March 1983 and derisively dubbed "Star Wars" by its opponents after the hit science-fiction movie, was an ambitious scheme to put laser-firing satellites into low orbit around the earth. These "killer satellites," assisted by a complex system of ground-based tracking radars, would intercept and destroy ICBMs at the height of their trajectory outside the earth's atmosphere. The program was projected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and it relied on future development of problematical new technologies. Domestic opposition based on cost, feasibility, and SDI's contravention of the ABM Treaty remained strong throughout Reagan's presidency.

In 1981, Reagan had suggested a "zero sum" option for tactical nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union promptly rejected. The president promised that NATO would refrain from deploying any American cruise missiles if the Soviet Union eliminated the ballistic missiles it had aimed at western Europe, including existing systems that had never been on the negotiating table before. This suggestion that the Soviet Union scrap extant missiles to preclude American deployment of systems that as yet were in the planning stage dumb-founded Soviet leaders. In November 1983 they broke off the INF discussions.

The U.S. arms buildup continued during a two-year hiatus in negotiations, as did NATO's planning for deployment of intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe. The inhabitants of NATO nations and other European countries did not wholeheartedly accept the alliance's decision to place additional U.S. tactical nuclear forces in Europe as counters to Soviet SS-20s, SS-5s, and SS-4s. Street protests erupted in the Federal Republic of Germany and the Netherlands, while parliaments and citizens across Europe reacted with alarm. Any Soviet attempt to turn these apparent fissures in NATO to negotiating advantage was foredoomed by a rapid succession of top leaders in Moscow. President Brezhnev had died in 1982, his successor, Yuri Andropov, in 1984, and Andropov's heir a year later.

Negotiations based on versions of Reagan's 1981 zero sum languished until Mikhail Gorbachev became the new secretary general of the Communist Party in March 1985. Relatively young at age fifty-four, and refreshingly dynamic in contrast with the typical Soviet apparatchik, Gorbachev was absolutely determined to liberalize the Soviet political system (glasnost), reform the economy (perestroika), and reduce expenditures for arms, especially nuclear missile systems. According to Michael K. Deaver, who served as Ronald Reagan's personal adviser for twenty years, the president sensed in Gorbachev a kindred spirit. "With Gorbachev, Reagan could do business, and business they would do, eliminating entire classes of nuclear weapons and paving the way for the literal collapse of arguably the greatest enemy we have ever faced." In three separate summit meetings between 1985 and 1987, this unique rapport greatly facilitated negotiations—up to a point. At the October 1986 meeting in Reykjavík, Iceland, the two heads of state came tantalizingly close to agreement on sweeping reductions in nuclear armaments and withdrawal of all American IRBMs from Europe. But things came unstuck when Gorbachev told Reagan, "All this depends, of course, on your giving up SDI." The president reacted with extreme defensiveness, and the meeting collapsed.

START was