This entry is a subentry of Strategy.
Within months of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that devastated those two cities in early August 1945, the basic questions that have bedeviled nuclear strategists and war planners ever since became evident in congressional testimony and published treatises. The United States itself would be vulnerable to air attack in future war, Congress was told in November 1945 by Gen. Carl A. Spaatz, head of U.S. Army Air Forces in Europe. Gen. “Hap” Arnold, commanding general of the Army Air Forces, warned Congress that since air attack could arrive without warning, the basic defense against such an attack would have to be the ability to launch a rapid, powerful air offensive against the source of the attack. “But, better still,” Arnold declared, “the actual existence of these weapons … in sufficient quantities and so located that a potential aggressor knows we can use them effectively against him, will have a very deterring effect, particularly if the aggressor does not know the whole story and only knows part of the story.”
Within these assertions lay the roots of U.S. strategic doctrine that were to permeate the Cold War: the concepts of deterrence on one hand and defense by destruction of the enemy's capacity for offensive action on the other; the vulnerability of the United States to surprise attack through the air; the need for extensive forces, variously deployed and capable of rapid action; and the perceived need for secrecy. These initial military concerns were mirrored by two civilian theorists—Bernard Brodie and William Borden.
Brodie, a Yale scholar who had first studied war at sea and now turned his attention to war from the air, wrote a paper in November 1945 entitled “The Atomic Bomb and American Security,” which was later included in expanded form as two chapters of The Absolute Weapon (1946), the first book published on nuclear strategy. In the paper, he staked out deterrence as the dominant concept of nuclear strategy. As he put it famously: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other purpose.” To achieve such deterrence, however, would require the United States “to take measures to guarantee to ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind.” For the next two decades, particularly in 1951–66, while he worked at the RAND Corporation, a newly established national security research institution in Santa Monica, California, Brodie set the pace among civilian theorists of nuclear strategy. His next book, Strategy in the Missile Age (1959), remains even today the only true classic on the essential questions of nuclear force structure (how much is enough? and hence, enough for what?) and force postures (offensive, defensive, retaliatory, preemptive, and air‐, land‐, or sea‐based).
In contrast to Brodie's emphasis on deterrence were the views of a colleague at Yale, William Borden, who wrote There Will Be No Time: The Revolution in Strategy (1946). Borden believed that atomic war was inevitable and would likely be fought by nuclear‐tipped intercontinental‐range rockets based in underground “hedgehogs” located far from cities and “on undersea platforms scattered throughout the world's oceans.” These would be aimed against the enemy's military forces rather than cities. Borden concluded that such a war could be won decisively and with only limited civilian damage. However, because of the secrecy surrounding preparations for such a war and the unprecedented powers the president would be granted in peacetime, Borden surmised that American democracy would be inevitably diminished. As noted by Gregg Herken, “with minor variations, the positions taken by Brodie and Borden endured as the opposite poles of a debate that would rage for the next forty years….”
Thus, even before the end of 1946, most major issues, except those resulting from such unforeseen technological developments as antiballistic missile (ABM) defenses and satellite reconnaissance, were already recognized. These included deterrence as an end in itself; offensive readiness and threatened retaliatory capability (eventually including missiles housed in silos in areas remote from population centers or aboard submarines in the ocean's depths) as the answer to defensive vulnerability; and the potential emergence of a “national security state.” Still, very few Americans read Brodie or Borden or otherwise became engaged in questions of “atomic strategy.” Most focused on the more pressing immediate problems of economic prosperity.
Within the military, during the administration of President Harry S. Truman (1945–51), war planning for what some called the “air atomic age” was initially incoherent. It was severely limited by the extreme secrecy governing nuclear matters, incessant interservice rivalry (such as the B‐36 bomber vs. the supercarrier controversy of 1949), and the ambivalent attitude of Truman regarding the nuclear weapons themselves. The planning process that evolved by the early 1950s was complex and variable, but can be sketched in broad outline. Initially, a Joint War Plans Committee (JWPC) in the Pentagon had the lead, but following passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and the creation of a U.S. Air Force separated from the army, an elaborately structured process of nuclear war planning emerged.
At its apex was the National Security Council (NSC), chaired by the president, which spelled out national security objectives and provided overall guidance regarding nuclear weapons. Below that were the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), who were responsible for translating generalized NSC guidance into specific strategic plans. The Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan (JSCP) covered global war planning for the coming year and was prepared annually. In addition, the Joint Strategic Objectives Plan (JSOP) projected a four‐ to six‐year time frame and was also prepared each year. The crucial elements of the nation's nuclear war plan—general guidance regarding target categories and desired damage levels—were contained in Annex C of the JSOP.
At the third level (below the NSC and JCS), the task was to identify specific targets and prepare operational plans detailing the means and timing of delivering the nuclear weapons to their targets. Until the late 1950s, identification of specific targets was the province of the Air Targets Division within the U.S. Air Force Directorate of Intelligence. Operational planning fell to the Strategic Air Command (SAC), which was moved in 1948 away from Washington, D.C., to the vicinity of Omaha, Nebraska.
Factors external to this formal planning process included intelligence estimates regarding the capability and vulnerability of the Soviet Union and technological change, especially as it affected the numbers, availability, and delivery modes of U.S. nuclear weapons. Also largely external to this process were the thoughts of the nuclear war theorists both within and outside the government, whose ideas, although they could affect public perceptions, were least important to the operational planners, whose work was directed essentially at pragmatic problem solving.
Nuclear war planning in the late 1940s and the 1950s can be summarized as follows: The people in the intelligence community, especially within the air force but also including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), looked for targets, all the while fearing they might miss important ones and hence listing all they could find. The people who worked on development of nuclear weapons, especially those people in the Atomic Energy Commission, focused on reducing the size of warheads, improving their yield (destructive power), and increasing their number to keep up with the growing target list. The people who planned the military operations—planners at SAC and later at the European, Atlantic, and Pacific unified commands (EUCOM, LANTCOM, and PACOM)—sought to match the available weapons to the designated targets.
Inevitably, given the compartmentalized secrecy governing the artificially separate elements of the nuclear war planning process, a certain dynamic arose. More targets required more weapons, which in turn required more delivery systems (aircraft, missiles, submarines). As a result, the day‐to‐day work of the operations planners had little to do with any subtleties of either nuclear strategy or deterrence theory. Rather, it had to do with deploying as effectively and efficiently as possible the weapons available against the targets assigned; in sum, pragmatic problem solving. It took a decade for the formal system to become fully institutionalized.
At first, however, prior to the 1949 test explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb, things were simpler. During the years between 1946 and 1949, the war planners in the U.S. military envisioned that war with the Soviet Union would be like World War II but on a more destructive scale. The United States then had few atomic weapons, let alone aircraft equipped to carry what were then extremely large and heavy nuclear bombs. The atomic‐capable bomber aircraft and their weapons would be “seeded” among normal B‐29 bombers at one of the American forward overseas bases. The detailed war plans remained secret until the end of the Cold War, when the early plans were declassified and published (1990) in fifteen volumes, edited by Steven T. Ross and David Alan Rosenberg, and entitled America's Plans for War Against the Soviet Union, 1945–1950. Plans since 1950 remain generally classified.
The initial scarcity of nuclear weapons was soon overcome. (The U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile grew from only a couple of warheads in 1945 to more than 500 in 1951, then exponentially to more than 1,000 in 1952, the last of which included 720 loadings on 660 bombers; by 1955, there were 2,250 warheads stockpiled with 1,755 loadings on 1,260 bombers.) The prodigious increase in the number of U.S. nuclear weapons resulted from a combination of technological breakthroughs and a dramatic surge in military spending, first by the Truman administration as a result of the Korean War (1950–53) and then as a result of a decision by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to emphasize the strategic nuclear forces while cutting back on the other armed services and reducing the overall defense budget.
In January 1954, following a year‐long review of defense policy by the administration, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced the doctrine of “Massive Retaliation”: the administration would rely upon the threat of nuclear escalation, including massive destruction of the Soviet Union, to deter or stop Soviet‐inspired local wars in the future. The policy was driven by the frustrations of the Korean War and Eisenhower's fears about the impact of increased defense spending upon the American economy. Essentially, it was an economic rather than a strategic decision, one that sought “more bang for the buck over the long haul.”
Massive retaliation provoked immediate debate. Some theorists of nuclear strategy questioned the credibility of the threat of a full‐scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union as the result of any conflict less than a Soviet invasion of Europe. Some questioned the sanity of introducing an “age of overkill,” arguing instead that the ability to deliver with certainty a relatively few nuclear weapons would be sufficient for the needs of deterrence. The “finite deterrence” school, however, despite a strong effort by the U.S. Navy in 1957, was never really accepted in the United States, even though Eisenhower's own view was that it was not necessary to be able to destroy the entire Soviet Union in order to deter Moscow.
Despite Eisenhower's personal view, other matters intervened, always with political overtones, to increase the U.S. nuclear stockpile. This included 3,550 nuclear warheads in 1956, with 2,123 loadings on 1,470 bomber‐based launchers, to 23,000 warheads stockpiled in 1961, with 3,153 loadings, including 3,083 on bombers, 57 on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and 80 on submarine‐launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Among the developments that contributed to the increase were the test explosion of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb in 1953; a 1954 RAND study, led by theorist Albert Wohlsetter, on the perceived vulnerability of SAC's forward bases overseas; intelligence failures positing a “bomber gap” with the Soviets outproducing the Americans in bombers; the 1957 Gaither Report warning of an impending “missile gap” in favor of the USSR, followed immediately by the Soviet launching of Sputnik (the first space satellite), falsely taken to demonstrate such a gap (which in fact favored the Americans); and the shooting down by the Soviets of one of the American U‐2 spy planes over the USSR in 1960. Still, by the end of the 1950s, the open threat of massive retaliation became muted, and steps were begun at the end of the decade to improve conventional forces as an alternative to nuclear confrontation.
The increased emphasis on conventional forces under the doctrine of Flexible Response was accelerated under President John F. Kennedy, but the Kennedy adminis tration (1961–63) also escalated the buildup of strategic nuclear forces to previously undreamt‐of levels. Under Kennedy, this occurred primarily by switching from the emphasis on bombers to land‐ and sea‐launched ballistic missiles, amounting to 1,000 Minuteman and 54 Titan land‐based intercontinental ballistic missiles and a fleet of 41 Polaris‐type submarines, each armed with 16 submarine‐launched ballistic missiles. Kennedy used the overwhelming American strategic superiority to help convince Moscow to back down in the Cuban Missile Crisis, leading the Soviets in the aftermath to increase dramatically their own strategic forces.
From 1948 through 1965, from President Truman to President Lyndon B. Johnson, the most important nuclear strategist in the United States was Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, who was commander of SAC (1948–57), U.S. Air Force vice chief of staff (1957–61), and air force chief of staff (1961–65). LeMay was absolutely determined to avoid a “nuclear Pearl Harbor” and was convinced that massive numerical superiority, with instant readiness, was the essence of deterrence. On several occasions, LeMay made it clear to his superiors that a preemptive attack option by the United States was written into the secret war plans (secret even from the JCS from 1951 to 1955). Furthermore, he had no interest in “this launch‐under‐attack business,” but instead, he planned to launch on warning (never formally defined), and with virtually the entire SAC nuclear force.
By 1960, SAC planners had identified some 8,000 targets to be destroyed in a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Also by that date, the navy's Polaris missile had been successfully tested. In an attempt to impose order on the target planning process (and incessant wrangling among the services), the president established the multiservice Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (JSTPS), which was directed to prepare a coordinated U.S. Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). Its first edition, formally designated SIOP‐62, became effective on 1 July 1961.
When briefed on the plan, President Kennedy and his defense secretary Robert S. McNamara found the existing SIOP wholly unacceptable, and they demanded changes to provide the president with a variety of options from which he could choose in a nuclear confrontation. As a result, the new “declared policy” emphasized the destruction of the enemy's military forces, not his civilian population; it was quickly dubbed the “counterforce” option as opposed to the previous “countervalue”—or city‐destroying—strategy. Although General LeMay disagreed with the new emphasis, he went along, especially once he realized that a counterforce strategy would mean an increased number of targets and, therefore, increased strategic forces.
In actuality, despite the change in declared policy, the war plan was not radically changed but merely provided with more options. The so‐called no‐cities strategy was, in truth, a sham, given the location of key military targets in or near cities and given the residual effects of nuclear detonations. Indeed, before leaving office in 1967, McNamara abandoned counterforce in favor of a capability to threaten the “assured destruction” of “one‐quarter to one‐third of [the Soviet Union's] population and about two‐thirds of its industrial capacity.” To be sure, the SIOP would now list several lesser options that a president might choose, but assured destruction was surely massive retaliation by another name. Given the enormous strategic nuclear forces in both the United States and the Soviet Union, “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD), while never a formal policy, was an apt description.
Subsequent presidents, secretaries of defense (especially James R. Schlesinger, Harold Brown, and Caspar Weinberger), and national security advisers (particularly Henry Kissinger) made fitful attempts to modify the targeting criteria and options of the SIOP. Three such instances that were leaked to the public involved the Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy (NUWEP‐1) signed by Schlesinger in April 1974; the Nuclear Targeting Policy Review of 1978; and Presidential Directive 59 (PD‐59), signed by President Jimmy Carter in July 1980. In each case, the changes were more declaratory than substantive, although this was difficult to discern given all the hoopla generated by the press, especially regarding an alleged new emphasis on targeting the “recovery capability” of the Soviet Union.
Most attention during the 1970s focused on the extent to which technological advances appeared to undermine any hopes for the stability of emerging arms control efforts. The first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), an attempt to cap the number of ICBMs and ABM defense systems, was signed by President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet premier Leonid I. Brezhnev in 1972. But it sidestepped the newly crucial issue of multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), whereby a single large ICBM could now carry as many as a dozen warheads that could, within trajectory limits, strike different targets. The Soviet emphasis on large ICBMs, especially the SS‐18 armed with MIRVs, quickly led to fears that the U.S. land‐based missile force had suddenly become vulnerable to a disarming first (or surprise) strike. Why the Soviets might decide to attempt such a strike was an irrelevant question in the war planning culture. If they could, they might, so capabilities rather than intentions or likelihoods were important. And for those concerned with a Soviet first strike there was always the fear that Moscow's true goal might not be a disarming first strike at all, but rather a new ability in a crisis to impose “nuclear blackmail” based on U.S. perceptions of the vulnerability of its own forces and their allied mechanisms of command and control.
Abetted by exaggerated claims regarding the accuracy of Soviet missiles, the United States, it was argued, would soon face an emerging “window of vulnerability” unless drastic measures were taken to “modernize” its forces. This meant the production of the B‐1 and B‐2 bombers, the MX missile, Trident submarines, the “hardening” of command and control networks, and replacement of the existing inventory of nuclear warheads with new and improved models. (The number of warheads in the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile had grown to 26,500 in 1962, 29,000 in 1963, 31,000 in 1964, and 31,500 in 1965 and 1966; it reached a peak of 32,000 in 1967; then began to drop, as older warheads were eliminated, to between 28,000 and 25,000 during the 1970s, where it remained until well into the 1980s. Meanwhile, the number of nuclear warheads loaded on various types of launchers averaged about 6,000 during the 1960s.) Critics of the argument about the need for such modernization to meet an alleged window of vulnerability were appalled. Their view was best encapsulated by Lord Solly Zuckerman, the British scientist, in his Nuclear Illusion and Reality (1982): “Once the numbers game took over, reason flew out the window.”
President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 fully committed to the direst possible view of the capabilities as well as the intentions of the Soviet Union. The SALT II talks, envisaging significant reductions, had begun in 1974, leading to a treaty signed by Carter and Brezhnev in June 1979. But divided American opinion led the Senate to delay action, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 effectively killed the treaty, at least until after the 1980 election.
The apparent enthusiasm with which the Reagan administration (1981–89) initially adopted the long dominant and prevailing views among war planners regarding “nuclear warfighting,” “countervailing strategy,” and other mantras going back to Herman Kahn's On Nuclear War (1960) frightened many Americans. Vice President George Bush's statement that a nuclear war was winnable, Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig's comment about “a nuclear demonstration shot,” and the president's own musings on a European nuclear war, along with outlandish remarks by civil defense officials on the survivability of nuclear war—all had the unforeseen effect of capturing the attention of a public accustomed to ignoring such issues for the previous twenty years. Despite the protest from a sizable and vocal segment of the public, the Reagan administration's position on nuclear war planning was not significantly different from that of its predecessors. However, it had brought to the declarative level, and thus made openly public, the assumptions upon which the operational level planners had been working for years—and that had shocked a considerable and influential segment of the public.
The reaction that set in during 1982–83, symbolized by the Nuclear Freeze Campaign and an unusual pastoral letter against nuclear war from the Roman Catholic bishops' conference in America, may well have played some part in leading the Reagan administration to shift focus to an improbable antimissile defense, the so‐called Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and move to reconsider the SALT II treaty by reopening the talks, soon relabeled START (Strategic Arms Reductions Talks). It was also during the Reagan administration that civilians began to assert somewhat more control over the war planning process, although the fundamentals were not changed.
In their analysis of the six Single Integrated Operational Plans (SIOPs) for U.S. nuclear strategy in effect from 1960 to 1985, Desmond Ball (with Jeffrey Richelson) concluded that the general categories and particular types of targets had remained remarkably resilient. They were the Soviet Union's military forces, its urban‐industrial structure, and its leadership centers. “Two developments have occurred, however,” Ball advised. “One is that the number of potential target installations … increased enormously, from …4,100 in 1960 … to some 50,000…. Second, these targets have been increasingly divided into a larger array of ‘packages’ of varying sizes and characteristics, providing … ‘customized’ options for an extremely wide range of possible contingencies.” In 1986, Ball saw little reason to expect these developments to change markedly.
But then came the dramatic events of 1989–91: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War threw all earlier calculations of nuclear war planning into doubt. In the initial transition, President George Bush (1989–93) ordered a nuclear targeting review. Conducted in 1989–91, it did not result in any radical changes but did lead to significant reductions in the number of targets. In the Bush administration, nuclear arms control efforts moved to the forefront, initially confounded by the location of Soviet ICBMs in at least four of the “successor republics” to the Soviet Union. In 1991, the United States and the Russians signed the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I). Under that treaty, the United States reduced its arsenal of strategic nuclear warheads loaded on launchers from 13,700 in 1987 down to about 7,000 in 1996. On his last day in office in January 1993, President Bush sent a second treaty, START II, to the Senate (which did not ratify it until January 1996; by the end of 1998, the Russian Duma still had not ratified the START II Treaty).
When President Bill Clinton took office in 1993, the entire U.S. military establishment was in a state of flux, undergoing radical reductions in personnel and weapons, coincident with a wholesale reorganization of the armed services, especially the air force. In 1992, the Strategic Air Command was transformed into a joint command. This new Strategic Command was headed first by Air Force Gen. George Lee Butler, former head of SAC, and subsequently by either an air force general or navy admiral.
Considerable pressure mounted in the late 1990s for reducing the nuclear arsenal. In December 1996, sixty retired generals and admirals from a number of countries, including the former Soviet Union and the United States (the latter including General Butler, now retired), issued a call for long‐term nuclear planning to be based on the assumption of eventual complete elimination of nuclear weapons. In March 1997, President Clinton and Russian president Boris N. Yeltsin agreed that if and when the Russian legislators approved START II, the two nations would begin talks on further reductions, to perhaps 2,000–2,500 warheads. In November 1998, with the Russian Duma still delaying ratification of the START II Treaty, Pentagon officials, driven as much by budgetary constraints as by reduced security risks, recommended that the Clinton administration consider unilateral reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, either reducing the number of loaded warheads from the approximately 7,000 that existed at the end of 1998 or eliminating some categories of strategic weapons.
The state of affairs in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union remained so uncertain and unpredictable that in the late 1990s, preexisting nuclear war plans, although placed in a tentative hold status, remained, as it were, on the shelf. Although the information is classified, it is possible that major changes in strategy and targeting have occurred or will occur. The principal concern of nuclear theorists, strategists, and war planners had become the proliferation—both real and potential—of nuclear capabilities around the world. President Clinton gave few indications that nuclear issues were high on his agenda, causing the very small percentage of the American public that pays attention to such matters considerable concern.
[See also Air and Space Defense; Air Force Combat Organizations: Strategic Air Forces; Arms Control and Disarmament: Nuclear; Arms Race: Nuclear Arms Race; De terrence; Nuclear Protest Movements; Nuclear War, Prevention of Accidental; Nuclear Weapons and War, Popular Images of; Procurement; SALT Treaties (1972, 1979); Theorists of War.]
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