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Chapter 1

Nuclear Strategy, 1950–1990: The Search for Meaning

Senator Glenn. I got lost in what is credible and not credible. This whole thing gets so incredible when you think about wiping out whole nations.

Secretary Brown. That is why we sound a little crazy when we talk about it.

—Defense Secretary Harold Brown and Senator John Glenn during U.S. Senate hearings, 1980

“Weapons in Search of a Doctrine”

Nuclear weapons, as Henry Kissinger often remarked during the Cold War, are weapons continually in search of a doctrine. The history of the evolution of nuclear strategy in the United States, as in the other nuclear powers, is a story of the ongoing attempt to find political meaning and military relevance in weapons so destructive that they defeat traditional notions about strategy and the use of force in international affairs. As early as 1946, the American strategic thinker Bernard Brodie wrote that nuclear weapons represented the “end of strategy,” since any attempt at strategic reasoning collapsed in the face of the twin facts that nuclear weapons existed and were unimaginably powerful.¹ The question that arose after the first detonation of a nuclear bomb in the summer of 1945 remains today: What do nuclear weapons actually do?

Nearly seven decades later, there is still no American consensus on this question. Scholars, security analysts, civilian policymakers, and military leaders all continue to be divided over whether nuclear arms exist to fight wars, or to prevent wars—or whether the readiness to fight increases or decreases the likelihood of having to fight at all. In 1984, Robert Jervis, echoing Brodie, charged that a “rational strategy for the employment of nuclear weapons is a contradiction in terms. The enormous destructive power of these weapons creates insoluble problems,” and thus the history of nuclear strategy “has been a series of attempts to find a way out of this predicament and return to the simpler, more comforting pre-nuclear world.”² Other strategists during the Cold War rejected this kind of thinking as defeatism; Colin Gray wrote in a 1979 reflection on Brodie’s work that even in the most terrifying circumstances, there is still “a role for strategy—that is, for the sensible, politically directed application of military power in thermonuclear war.”³

Those debates continue to the present day, but they cannot be understood without examining the Cold War efforts that preceded them. The world-destroying strategies conjured by the professional strategists, “the Wizards of Armageddon,” in Fred Kaplan’s famous phrase, are largely relics of the past, relegated to history by the generations who lived through the Cold War and regarded as curiosities by younger generations who did not.⁴ Nonetheless, the theories that animated the work of the Cold War strategists remain at the foundation of current thinking about nuclear issues.

The 1950s: “At Times and Places of Our Own Choosing”

For the first few years after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States did not have a nuclear “strategy” so much as it had a nuclear “problem.” American leaders had difficulty comprehending the enormity of their new super-weapon; while they saw the devastation visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these were relatively small, one-sided attacks that were retribution for a surprise attack, four years of war, and hundreds of thousands of U.S. casualties. The first two nuclear bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, inflicted a huge amount of destruction in moments, but the damage was still comparable to the ruin inflicted in slow-motion over weeks of relentless firebombing, and both of the afflicted Japanese cities still stand today.

Within years of Japan’s defeat, however, nuclear delivery systems became more reliable and nuclear bombs became vastly more powerful. In short order, nuclear attack was no longer even remotely comparable to a strategic bombing campaign. Instead, policymakers had to think about the instant and complete destruction of dozens of major cities from long distances, a horrifying concept never before encountered in the study or practice of war.

The essence of the American problem in this first decade after World War II was that unarguable nuclear superiority did not seem to buy very much security, especially in Europe. The newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization faced the conventional superiority of a Communist coalition that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Worse, the Western nuclear arsenal (Britain’s first bomb was detonated in 1952) did not seem to imbue the Soviet Union with any greater sense of caution: nuclear weapons did not thwart Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s gambles in Berlin, nor did they prevent the invasion of South Korea. The Americans and their allies, as Lawrence Freedman later wrote, felt they were “being forced into fighting the [Cold War] and would have to fight any future hot war according to ground rules laid down by the communists.”⁵ Years later, revelations from Soviet archives and interviews of former Soviet policymakers would show that the Soviets were in fact acutely conscious of the danger of war and particularly of nuclear war.⁶ But Stalin himself, bolstered by the crushing victory over the Nazis and the acquisition of a new European empire, was nonetheless willing to run significant risks even in the face of a nuclear near-monopoly.⁷

The U.S. solution at the time was the strategy of “Massive Retaliation,” first described in a 1953 U.S. National Security Council paper and enunciated publicly a year later in more detail by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. President Dwight Eisenhower’s initial “New Look” at strategy affirmed that nuclear weapons would be essential to repulse a Soviet attack on the U.S. and NATO. Dulles went farther, and warned that the utility of nuclear arms extended beyond the battlefield: they could even act as a general strategic deterrent. That is, a U.S. nuclear attack on a grand scale—“Massive Retaliation”—against the USSR or its allies would henceforth be the price for any kind of Soviet or Communist-sponsored aggression, anywhere in the world.

No longer would the Americans try to match the USSR man for man and pound for pound. Instead, Washington would try to exploit its nuclear superiority by using it to deter Soviet aggression. Moscow was put on notice that any major offenses (however they might be defined) by the USSR or its proxies against the Western allies would result in the United States exercising its “great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of [America’s] choosing.”⁸

The Americans really had little choice at the time. Even with mass conscription or huge increases in defense spending, there was no way to fight the Communist bloc on its own terms. Outmanned and outgunned, the West had no hope of protecting every possible corner of the earth from a hemispheric Sino-Soviet alliance. Korea, where Western arms had restored the status quo only by a whisker, was proof enough of that. Allowing the East to dictate the terms of every engagement would be disastrous. “If the enemy,” Dulles said in 1954, “could pick his time and his place and method of warfare—and if our policy was to remain the traditional one of meeting aggression by direct and local opposition—then we needed to be ready to fight in the Arctic and the tropics, in Asia, in the Near East and in Europe; by sea, by land, by air; by old weapons and by new weapons.”⁹ Massive Retaliation was an asymmetric solution to this asymmetric dilemma, with nuclear weapons threatened as the dire punishment that Western conventional forces could not guarantee.

As a concept, Massive Retaliation was simplicity itself. As an actual strategy, however, it lacked clarity and credibility. The most obvious and logical question centered on the nuclear threshold. What might trigger U.S. retaliation? An invasion of Europe, certainly, but beyond that? Aggression in Indochina? Soviet abuse of its own allies? Proxy warfare conducted by a third power? Massive Retaliation was a hammer, not a scalpel, and it could not be tailored for anything much less than a direct, punishing attack on the Soviet Union. The Americans themselves were not sure where the nuclear lines were drawn, as there were simply too many scenarios to contemplate. It is one thing to induce uncertainty in the opponent; it is another entirely to share that uncertainty. (As we will see in Chapter 4, the United States replicated this mistake four decades later in trying to gain political leverage from its nuclear arsenal against rogue states after the Cold War.)

The true Achilles’ heel of the whole strategy, however, was that it rested on the inherently unsustainable condition of U.S. nuclear superiority. Massive Retaliation, a deeply flawed concept from the outset, could only last until the USSR developed the ability to retaliate in kind. Soviet leaders accordingly developed a missile-centric doctrine focused on a swift and secure retaliatory capability. In 1960, the USSR established the Strategic Rocket Forces, described by the Soviet defense minister at the time as “unquestionably the main service of the Armed Forces.”¹⁰ America’s threats of nuclear punishment after 1960 would now have to be made in the teeth of an inevitable Soviet nuclear response, and Soviet-era authors themselves accurately described Massive Retaliation as defunct by 1960.

Massive Retaliation, never fully conceptualized and never executed, in short order became obsolete in the face of new Soviet capabilities. In the end, “Massive Retaliation” was less a strategy than an expression of desperation, and it could not last into the missile age.

The 1960s and the Rise of the Strategists

As the Soviet arsenal grew in both size and capability, U.S. leaders tried to salvage some sense of purpose for their own rapidly increasing nuclear stockpile. The American capacity to destroy the USSR with impunity was out of reach by the time President John F. Kennedy took office in 1960; he was told bluntly (and correctly) by his military advisors that even if the United States launched everything it had at every possible Soviet, Chinese, and Eastern European target, some portion of the Soviet arsenal was certain to survive and inflict horrifying amounts of damage on North America.¹¹ Accordingly, nuclear strategy became a more evenly matched, two-sided game between the United States and the Soviet Union.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was determined in this period to wrest control of nuclear issues away from the military, whose approach to nuclear strategy consisted largely of making operational plans to match weapons to targets.¹² Nuclear targeting was no small enterprise in itself; by the mid-1970s, U.S. nuclear war planners had marked 40,000 potential targets for nuclear destruction in the Soviet bloc.¹³ But targeting is not the same thing as “strategy,” and McNamara wanted decisions over nuclear issues vested in a growing class of civilian defense analysts and policy intellectuals. This set the stage for the rise of the U.S. nuclear strategists, who would generate the many scenarios and strategies that dominated American nuclear thinking well into the 1980s.

Military control of nuclear strategy was undesirable, but the arrival of the civilian strategists was no less problematic. Soon, the nuclear enterprise represented the worst of both worlds, with both military officers and civilian analysts melded into a single community of nuclear experts. To be sure, the Americans (and others) needed to develop greater expertise on nuclear questions, but the unique tribe of defense specialists that emerged in the 1960s soon developed their own language, culture, and customs, which contributed to a growing gulf between theory and policy.

The dispassionate analysis of the use of nuclear weapons, for example, required a new vocabulary, a kind of nuclear Newspeak. Expressions such as “launch on warning” and “counterforce” entered the lexicon, and terms such as “collateral damage” took on significantly amplified meaning. As Kaplan put it, the strategists “performed their calculations and spoke in their strange and esoteric tongues because to do otherwise would be to recognize, all too clearly and constantly, the ghastliness of their contemplations.”¹⁴ Much like taking a person through the classic stages of grief, thinkers such as Herman Kahn insisted that Americans had to move past denial and anger, and reach acceptance of the nuclear age. This process entailed calmly thinking through horrific scenarios in which millions of people would die and entire nations would be pulverized.¹⁵ Kahn and other strategists pressed U.S. policymakers to think about the question posed in academic articles and quickly satirized in pop culture landmarks such as Dr. Strangelove: do we prefer 20 million dead or 100 million dead?

As soulless or amoral as it might appear, this kind of strategic theorizing served the necessary purpose of allowing ordinary human beings to think about extraordinary situations. Just as euphemism and scientific language assist medical doctors and other professionals in studying their specializations even as they wrestle with the heartbreaking suffering and eventual death of their charges—“pain management” and “end-of-life issues,” as they are now gently called—so too did the detached and clinical language of the new strategists enable the contemplation of conflicts of a scale that would dwarf all the wars ever fought in human history.

There was, however, both a moral and an intellectual corrosiveness to this increasingly professionalized approach to nuclear strategy. It may have been necessary to “think about the unthinkable,” but soon what was once unthinkable became an ordinary part of U.S. and Soviet national security policies. Military officers and civilian bureaucrats routinized the work of nuclear war planning, often in isolation from the rest of the defense community. This insularity, as Kaplan later wrote, allowed the nuclear theologians to avoid the reality that their efforts always led back to the same dead-end:

In the absence of any reality that was congenial to their abstract theorizing, the strategists in power treated the theory as if it were reality. For those mired in thinking about it all day, every day, in the corridors of officialdom, nuclear strategy had become the stuff of a living dreamworld. This mixture of habit, inertia, analytical convenience and fantasy was fueled by a peculiar logic as well. It was, after all, only rational to try to keep a nuclear war limited if one ever broke out…. Yet over the years, despite endless studies, nobody could find any options that seemed practical or made sense. [emphasis original]¹⁶

Much like the aridity that came to characterize too much of the social sciences after they embraced “scientific” approaches in the 1970s, so too did the analysis of nuclear strategy quickly become distanced from what policymakers could reasonably comprehend. Looking back at the various briefings and scenarios for war presented to U.S. leaders, Senator Sam Nunn later said: “You can sit around and read all the analytical stuff in the world, but once we start firing battlefield nuclear weapons, I don’t think anybody knew.”¹⁷ The theorists could pontificate and the war gamers could run their exercises, but as the numbers of weapons grew, the mathematics of nuclear war soon defied the imagination, just as the choices involved challenged the limits of moral reasoning.¹⁸

Both superpowers accelerated their acquisition of nuclear arms at remarkable rates. The United States alone managed to construct more than 30,000 weapons by 1967, only twenty-two years after the first nuclear test. The Soviet arsenal, too, was growing almost geometrically, and both sides soon commanded a host of delivery options that ranged from artillery shells to multiple-warhead ballistic missiles based on land and under the sea.

At these levels of numbers, what use were nuclear threats? Ironically, since every scenario for a major exchange led down the same path of annihilation, the U.S. and Soviet heartlands were now safer from direct assault, since neither side could chance a first strike. The sneak attack scenario feared in the 1950s—the so-called “BOOB,” or “bolt out of the blue,” attack—was no longer possible: a first-strike could neither disarm the victim nor save the attacker. The much greater complication, with North America itself now vulnerable to Soviet weapons, was not whether the United States could defend itself, but whether the Americans would risk nuclear war for their allies in NATO.

The attempt to protect one group of nations with the nuclear weapons of another is the problem of “extended deterrence.” To kill in self-defense, or in defense of the family or group, is a common human instinct. Dying for others requires overcoming the instinct for self-preservation with altruism and a notion of a greater good. It may well be, as the New Testament teaches, that there is no greater love than that “a man lay down his life for his friends,” but U.S. leaders realized early on in the Cold War that to risk the lives of entire nations and the peace of the world itself on behalf of others was a more complicated proposition, especially after the two world wars had taught humanity a bloody lesson in what the defense of alliances could mean. The Soviets might not doubt that the Americans would make a brave last stand and use nuclear weapons to protect the North American homeland. But could the United States make an equally credible nuclear threat on behalf of their friends in Europe?

The United States was in a painful bind. Washington could hardly back away from a nuclear guarantee for NATO without seeing the Alliance crumble, first politically and then militarily, under the Soviet conventional threat. There was no alternative to defending Europe, but in the face of Soviet conventional superiority, the defense of Europe was impossible without keeping nuclear weapons in play.

When the United States held a nuclear monopoly, a strategy such as Massive Retaliation could more credibly threaten to punish the Kremlin for aggression against NATO. Holding the nuclear trump card lowered the cost to the Americans of making threats on Europe’s behalf, not least because the consequences of any test of that resolve would fall almost entirely on the Soviet Union. But once the USSR obtained a secure retaliatory capability, that guarantee would now have to extend to the point of being willing to place the continental United States squarely in the Soviet nuclear crosshairs. Thus, extended deterrence was an immense gamble: it rested not on the intuitive understanding of self-defense, but increasingly on the imponderable question of whether a U.S. president would really risk trading Chicago for Bonn or New York for Paris.

Accordingly, the first order of business for U.S. strategists in the early 1960s was to scrap Massive Retaliation, ending its short tenure within only a few years of its announcement. Future U.S. presidents and their advisors would need more options to deal with a full spectrum of Soviet aggression other than the single choice of incinerating the USSR. A strategy such as Massive Retaliation could not serve the goals of extended deterrence, because it would require the Soviets to believe that an American president would be so steely—or so unhinged—that he would escalate directly from conventional hostilities in Europe to central nuclear war between the United States and the USSR. The key to strengthening the Western deterrent thus relied on showing the Soviet leaders that their American counterparts would, in effect, be left with no other way out but nuclear conflict. A new strategy would have to chart a path, one the Soviets could understand, that would credibly link a crisis to a catastrophe, and therefore induce caution in Moscow.

In order to establish the requirements for a more credible deterrent, Western thinkers began to explore the actual steps to nuclear war. In 1957, for example, Henry Kissinger published his seminal work, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, and the generation of strategists McNamara would later call upon were already working through these problems at research centers such as the RAND Corporation in California. It was at RAND that Herman Kahn first conceptualized the escalatory “ladder” described in his 1960 opus, On Thermonuclear War. Kahn’s ladder was not a guide to nuclear war itself; rather, it was a detailed examination of various steps each side might take before finding themselves, willingly or not, propelled from a cold peace to complete destruction. Each rung of the ladder, such as “limited evacuation of cities” or “barely nuclear war,” was a stop along the way toward the final step of “spasm” or “insensate” war.¹⁹ Massive Retaliation was not credible because it was a threat to make an intentional leap from the lowest rungs of the ladder of escalation to the very highest. The challenge for U.S. policymakers trying to craft a new deterrent in its place, then, was to reduce the distance between each of these rungs by inserting realistic options that did not require momentous or even irrational decisions.

Shortly after arriving in Washington, the Kennedy administration set about trying to construct a more durable U.S. deterrent, both conceptually and materially. The first trial balloon from the Kennedy White House, however, was a hopelessly optimistic “no-cities” strategy, in which Washington and Moscow somehow would agree to refrain from targeting each other’s civilian population centers. This proposal represented an American attempt to draw a distinction between “countervalue” attacks, which would strike a full range of social and political targets such as cities and government institutions, and “counterforce” attacks, which would be aimed only at military assets. The goal, at least in theory, was to enhance crisis stability by showing a willingness to discriminate between military targets and cities; presumably, an enemy would be more willing to tough it out and not attack during a tense period if assured that the other side had not targeted civilians and urban centers. At the least, an offer to limit targets might spur a similar pledge from the opponent and keep a nuclear exchange from raging out of control. Ideally, it would help avert war itself not only by sending a message of restraint to the Soviets, but by showing that the United States had come up with a real purpose for nuclear weapons besides the mindless killing of Soviet citizens.²⁰

“No cities” was one of many attempts to place a rung on Kahn’s ladder somewhere between the outbreak of conventional hostilities and total nuclear war. Like Massive Retaliation, however, it was inherently flawed. Indeed, it was a strategy that only a pure theorist could love, and it could not survive first contact with the real world, where its success would have to rely on the goodwill of a cooperative adversary in the midst of a possible holocaust. Even if both belligerents could reach some sort of prior agreement about conducting a nuclear war, a strategy of “city-avoidance” was doomed from the start by the fact that so many Soviet targets, and no small number of American assets, were located close to population centers. Were Moscow and Washington, the military nerve centers of their respective nations, to be spared? (And if they were slated to be destroyed, who would be left to negotiate a ceasefire or surrender on either side?) The sanctity of cities could never be guaranteed, and a promise not to hit them, or at least not to hit them in the first thirty minutes of the war, was not a promise worth making.

After a period of vigorous debate in the 1960s (during which the shock of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis nearly rendered the whole Soviet-American conflict moot), the United States and its allies in 1967 codified a strategy of “Flexible Response,” which NATO described as “a flexible and balanced range of appropriate responses, conventional and nuclear, to all levels of aggression or threats of aggression” (emphasis added).²¹ Here, the Americans and their allies tried to overcome the credibility problems inherent in “extended deterrence,” and to link the defense of North America to the defense of the entire North Atlantic community. Rather than threaten discretionary retaliation at “times and places of our choosing” with the consequent killing of millions of civilians on both sides, U.S. and NATO strategists instead crafted a strategy of deliberate escalation backed by a wider menu of both conventional and nuclear military choices. Now, NATO would fight its way up the escalatory ladder, instead of jumping from the first rung to the last.

As before, the conventional defense of NATO in Europe had virtually no chance of succeeding against a Soviet invasion. That, of course, was the point: the United States and its allies might not resort to strategic nuclear attacks at the outset of the war, but if faced with a Soviet onslaught, they would have no choice but to escalate to tactical nuclear options on the battlefield. The first salvos would halt the Soviet advance, and then the burden either of defeat or escalation would shift to Moscow. Instead of the bluster of Massive Retaliation, the new approach in Flexible Response tried to convince the Soviets that escalation would happen practically by default. Nuclear use would no longer have to result from courageous or stoic American decisions, but would instead be driven by Soviet actions.

Flexible response relied on presenting the Kremlin with a paradox, in which the success of Warsaw Pact conventional forces on the battlefield would increase the chance that nuclear weapons would be used against them. Accordingly, U.S. nuclear weapons were intentionally placed in forward positions where they would be overrun by advancing Eastern forces. Henceforth, the Soviets would know that if war broke out in Europe, NATO commanders would be cornered, through no fault of their own, into having to use their nuclear arms or lose them once overwhelmed. Soviet leaders, at least in theory, would be presented with a storyline they could understand and believe, in which the first Soviet bullet fired in Europe would inexorably be tied to the last U.S. or British missile launched from the last silo or submarine. The Soviets would therefore understand that war would likely lead to consequences that neither side wanted but that neither could escape if a crisis were to spin out of control.

NATO’s explicit rejection of “no first use,” the pledge not to initiate the release of nuclear weapons, was central to this strategy. Logically, a promise not to escalate to nuclear force had to be rejected as a matter of doctrinal first principles: if the Soviet Union truly intended to menace Europe, NATO thinkers reasoned, a “no first use” pledge would be an open invitation to Moscow to try to keep the conflict at the conventional level, where the Soviet advantage was greatest. Instead, NATO’s adoption of Flexible Response hammered home the point that the Americans and their allies were ready to drag the Soviets, rung by rung, up the escalatory ladder. A conventional war risked a battlefield nuclear war, and the tactical use of nuclear weapons risked theater nuclear war. At that point, the sunk costs of millions dead, the imminence of defeat, the panic of mass destruction, and the fog of war would all combine to make general nuclear war seem plausible and perhaps even probable. With Flexible Response, NATO was hoping to convince the leaders of the Kremlin that no matter how many men in the Red Army or missiles in the silos of the Strategic Rocket Forces, a war in Europe could not be won and to embark on such a mad enterprise would gain nothing while risking everything.

Parity and the Advent of Mutual Assured Destruction

In the mid-1960s, the Soviets began a major military buildup, including rapid increases in their nuclear forces.²² By the end of the decade, the USSR would catch up to the Americans in strategic nuclear power, creating a situation of approximate nuclear equality, or “parity.” While somewhat unequal in the numbers and distribution of their forces, by any standard each side now controlled roughly as much nuclear firepower as the other, and each could surely destroy the other under any circumstances. (Later in the decade, American secretaries of defense James Schlesinger and Harold Brown would use other terms such as “essential equivalence,” but the idea was the same.) The mathematics of parity were unarguable, but the politics were less clear: what did it mean now that East and West were so closely matched?

In concrete terms, little had changed since the early 1960s. Nuclear war still meant appalling levels of damage to both sides, with no hope of anything like a meaningful “victory” for either East or West when it was over. The arrival of Soviet-American parity represented the crossing of a psychological borderline more than a change in the military balance, since it was achieved at numbers of weapons so high that any asymmetries were functionally meaningless. For many American strategists, parity meant the end of any further toying with the pretense of fighting, much less “winning,” a nuclear war.

In fact, McNamara and his deputies in President Lyndon Johnson’s administration had already decided by the late 1960s to take what they saw as a more direct and stabilizing approach, and to discard the question of victory entirely. Instead, the Americans sought to stress to the Soviets the unavoidable and permanent damage that both sides could do to each other. The Americans proposed, in effect, to enter into a mutual hostage arrangement with the Soviet Union, where each side would forego defenses, cap limits on strategic arms, and do their best to avoid all-out nuclear war. Any indication that either side felt it could survive a nuclear war, such as civil defense programs, would be considered provocative. Likewise, there would be no attempts to hide the size and readiness of retaliatory forces. The more each side understood about the reliability of the other’s deterrent, the better. The Americans hoped that the Soviets would internalize and institutionalize the central fact of the superpower confrontations in the 1950s and 1960s that culminated in the Cuban scare: every crisis carried the risk of the extinction of both combatants.

The Soviets were not persuaded, or at least pretended they were not persuaded. The flinty Soviet marshals conceded only that victory, at best, would be defined not by a final crushing of the enemy such as the glorious Soviet entry into Berlin, but instead by the eventual long-term recovery of one system more rapidly than the other and the subsequent domination over whatever was left of the world. This position—echoed at times by some American politicians—remained the official Soviet line throughout the 1970s.²³ In both private and public diplomacy, however, Moscow acted with considerably more circumspection than its rhetoric might have suggested. In 1981, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev finally referred to the idea of nuclear victory as “dangerous madness,” which was a hopeful sign. Later revelations, however, showed that Brezhnev’s comments were actually part of an ongoing civil-military struggle at the highest levels of the Soviet regime over the issue of nuclear war.²⁴ Whether the Kremlin’s high command really believed the USSR could win a nuclear war can never truly be known. It might have been a bluff to intimidate the Americans (who had more than a few generals and strategists with similar views themselves), or it may have represented an inability to think beyond the parallels with World War II that dominated Soviet military writings.²⁵

Most American analysts were far less sanguine than the Soviet brass about the outcome of World War III, and believed that both sides would be destroyed in any sizable nuclear exchange. Initially, this new doctrine was called “assured destruction,” and finally, by the wry acronym that its founders believed best described it: “MAD,” or mutual assured destruction. Although MAD seemed like a simple idea in which the victim and the attacker both perish, it was actually far more complicated. Even its various proponents did not fully agree on what it meant, and there were competing notions of MAD during the Cold War that were not fully consistent with each other. Some accepted the possibility of limited nuclear use, while the most pristine version assumed that nuclear war inevitably meant total war and subsequent annihilation. In the end, however, even the Soviets had to bow to the reality that MAD itself was a fact rather than a policy, in the sense that the ability of both sides to destroy each other was empirically undeniable.²⁶

More arguable is what that fact meant for actual policy. Proponents of MAD argued that to ignore the reality of mutual destruction was like trying to ignore the weather, which is always present and always the same for everyone. Opponents of MAD—many of them among the civilian and military national security elites both in the United States and USSR—rejected the helplessness and passivity implied in a doctrine of mutual destruction. They argued that even if MAD was a fact, it was self-defeating to admit it, and they rejected the idea of explicitly accepting a dangerous and delicately balanced nuclear standoff as at best counterintuitive, if not flatly ridiculous.²⁷

As far as McNamara and the MAD advocates were concerned, Soviet and American arsenals had reached such staggering levels of quantity and destructive quality that mutual destruction was inescapable. The American public, however, was understandably skeptical about a strategy whose most prominent feature was to leave the United States open to attack. MAD, at least to some critics, sounded like a retreat in the face of the new and improved Soviet nuclear arsenal. Some of those critics were members of Congress, and McNamara consequently found himself having to reassure concerned legislators on Capitol Hill that the United States could still kill most of the Soviet population if necessary. “I think we could all agree,” he said in testimony before the Senate in early 1967, “that if [the Soviets] struck first we are going to target our weapons against their society and destroy 120 million of them.”²⁸

The emergence of MAD as an explicit concept did not end the nuclear debate in either the United States or the Soviet Union. Rather, strategists on both sides intensified their search for ways out of the mutual destruction cage by trying to find more discriminating and thus supposedly more credible military uses for nuclear weapons. Opponents of a pure deterrence strategy, especially among the senior U.S. military leadership, argued that the only way to deter a nuclear war was to appear ready to fight one. Thus, as Kaplan notes, McNamara “talked Assured Destruction,” but “the actual targeting strategy” created by the U.S. military remained counterforce, and the Secretary’s attempts to use a doctrine of assured destruction as a means of “beating back the excessive demands of the military and [Joint Chiefs]” failed in the face of the Pentagon’s insistence on being able to fight a global nuclear war.²⁹ (Two critics of this approach later sarcastically referred to these warfighting requirements as a strategy of “Nuclear Utilization Target Selection”—that is, “NUTS” as opposed to “MAD.”)³⁰

This inherent tension between targeting and doctrine continues in U.S. nuclear strategy to the present day. Although America’s nuclear doctrine during the Cold War was termed “assured destruction,” its nuclear forces were designed and postured for both a counterforce war as well as retaliatory strikes. Military logic demanded that the most pressing targets for U.S. strategic forces should be the same type of enemy nuclear forces, followed by other military targets, energy and industrial infrastructure, and finally, population. This ordering of strikes was meant to communicate to the enemy that in the event of nuclear war, the United States would act like a rational military power and seek first and foremost to protect itself (while sparing innocent civilians as much as possible), and then proceed to strip the enemy of its ability to fight, its ability to govern, its ability to recover, and finally, its ability to exist at all. The paradox, of course, was that a readiness to proceed along so orderly a path of escalation also ran the risk of signaling that that the United States did not fear “assured” destruction and was willing to fight a nuclear conflict—thus theoretically giving the enemy an incentive to abandon further efforts at deterrence, and instead to strike first and hope for the best.

The advocates of MAD had the better argument about nuclear targeting, not only because of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, but because of the continual problem of “co-location,” meaning the proximity of military targets to nonmilitary areas. This is not a dilemma specific to nuclear war, of course: imprecise conventional bombers in World War II could not avoid devastating the areas around military targets placed in or near cities. Likewise, there was no way the nuclear counterforce scenario could really discriminate between military and civilian targets in any meaningful way—or at least not in a way that would allow the enemy to distinguish a limited strike from an all-out attack.

While there might be some hypothetical chance of limiting the use of nuclear arms on the battlefield, or even in the theater of war, those limits would almost certainly evaporate minutes into a strategic exchange. An attack meant only to cripple U.S. land-based missiles, for example, would require several hundred, if not thousands of warheads. Such a strike would be so large that the destruction would be indistinguishable from an attempt at national obliteration, especially in the midst of the kind of chaos which would surround a U.S. president in the few moments left for deliberation over how to respond. No matter what either side wanted or intended, the terrible imperative of MAD would quickly assert itself once such an exchange was under way

The search for a silver bullet that could solve this dilemma and allow a longer interval of nuclear warfighting (and thus ostensibly limit the conflict early) inevitably led both sides to think about missile defenses. By the mid-1960s, land- and sea-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) constituted the main Soviet and American deterrent forces, and once the superpowers could destroy each other in a matter of minutes, the urge to find a way out of that paralyzing reality was sure to follow. The idea of a national missile defense capable of destroying nuclear-armed, long-range ballistic missiles in flight was a natural extension of the Cold War arms race.³¹

The discussion about missile defenses in the 1960s was more important as a conceptual exercise rather than as practical effort. Missile defenses of any kind are complicated and difficult to construct even in the twenty-first century, but national defenses were virtually impossible in the era before the development of more advanced technologies. Supercomputers with only a fraction of the speed and computing power of a modern notebook or laptop computer cost millions of dollars each in the 1960s and 1970s. (Consider, for example, that the recently retired U.S. space shuttle at first carried less computing power aboard than people take for granted in their mobile phones today.) Moreover, “defenses” in the 1960s were not precise weapons that could cleanly eliminate incoming strikes and thus save large, soft targets such as cities. Rather, they were blunt instruments that relied on exploding nuclear weapons—some as large as five megatons—high in the atmosphere to wipe out the armada of warheads falling onto North America from space.

The Americans concluded early on that there was no way these systems could defend anything but the most hardened targets such as missile silos, and even those stood little chance of survival under most circumstances. But as Kaplan later observed, “once a few billion dollars are spent on any weapons program, the chance of stopping it from going into production is practically nil.”³² The Soviets, of course, had enough weapons to overwhelm any such defense easily, and could always build more. This early Cold War missile defense enterprise finally ended up resting on a half-hearted rationale based on stopping a putative (and at the time, nonexistent) Chinese ballistic threat. The idea was too seductive to abandon completely, but too impractical to defend with any semblance of technological seriousness. One of McNamara’s deputies casually asked him if he really wanted to make the case that the United States needed a defense against a future ICBM threat from Asia: “China bomb, Bob?” McNamara muttered in reply: “What else am I going to blame it on?”³³ Eventually, the whole idea was shelved, at least for the time being.

American strategists in the late 1960s, under Lyndon Johnson and then President Richard Nixon, continued the quest to find political meaning in a strategic nuclear exchange even as they increasingly doubted whether such meaning existed. The Soviets, for their part, as disciples of both Clausewitz and Lenin, continued to insist, at least publicly, that even nuclear war would have a political character and that a meaningful victory was possible. This Soviet obstinacy was a challenge for the Americans, because a stable deterrent relationship requires that both sides have some sort of common understanding of the threat and of what each has at stake. The Americans hoped that an East-West agreement not to engage in mutual hemispheric suicide implied a more lasting foundation for cooperation and understanding between Moscow and Washington. The Soviets, however, had agreed to no such thing and were having none of it, choosing instead to regard the strategic nuclear standoff as a license to engage in various kinds of mischief so long as they avoided the risk of general war.³⁴

MAD might have been an unarguable fact in terms of describing a strategic nuclear stalemate, but as a policy it was far more contentious. Supporters of an assured destruction doctrine would claim that all MAD was ever supposed to do was to prevent a global disaster, and that by the mid-1970s it was performing that task admirably. Critics countered that the concept had done little more than self-deter the United States from confronting an increasingly aggressive Soviet Union, and had done little to stop a dramatic expansion of Soviet power that the Kremlin itself extolled with considerable pride. For a growing number of these skeptics, MAD looked more like an unholy bargain than a guarantee of global peace.

The Countervailing Strategy and the Collapse of MAD

The 1970s were not kind to the United States. From the defeat in Vietnam to the economic shock of an oil embargo, the Americans and their NATO allies were reeling from a loss of confidence at a time when the USSR was surging in power and influence. America was retreating from its alliances and partnerships, while the Soviet presence around the world was growing rapidly. Worse, the Soviets made no pretense of caring what the United States or the hapless Europeans thought about anything. As former Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin described in his memoirs, the Soviet leadership would discuss their advances and plans in various regions without so much as a passing reference to the United States.³⁵

Soviet adventures were difficult enough to handle while the United States enjoyed nuclear superiority, but with the arrival of Soviet-American nuclear parity, nuclear war plans were even less use to U.S. leaders in 1972 than they had been in 1962. The Pentagon, in trying to unite a number of various operational plans for each part of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, by the early 1960s had factored them all into a giant “Single Integrated Operational Plan” (SIOP) for nuclear war with the USSR, but they still envisioned horrendous amounts of destruction. President Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, were as dissatisfied with these war plans as McNamara had been before them, especially because of their inflexibility and their massive human costs. “Nixon,” historian William Burr has written, “was plainly troubled by the SIOP, especially the huge number of projected fatalities.”³⁶

During Nixon’s second term in office, Kissinger finally ordered a complete review of strategic nuclear policy. At a meeting in summer 1973, Kissinger noted that Nixon had not been provided with any other nuclear options other than a full briefing on the SIOP “three or four years” earlier, which “did not fill him with enthusiasm.”³⁷ The object, yet again, was to provide Nixon with more flexibility in the new conditions of Soviet parity and Mutual Assured Destruction so that he, or any U.S. president, would be able to deter the Soviets with something less than catastrophe. In a way, the new condition of parity created the old dilemmas of Massive Retaliation all over again.

The targeting process, as always, was still out of civilian control. Kissinger noted that the SIOP given to Nixon did not “distinguish between retaliation and first strike,” because it was an inflexible plan that required hitting every target in the USSR. At the outset of the 1973 meeting, Kissinger needled the Joint Chiefs representative, Vice Admiral John Weinel: “We have been discussing this topic for four years and have come to no conclusions. This is probably by JCS design.”³⁸ (“You give us undue credit,” Weinel shot back, and Kissinger then pointedly noted that he had expected to see the JCS chairman, not a deputy, at the meeting.)

Kissinger wasn’t far wrong. As Burr points out, the Joint Chiefs had resisted coming up with more limited scenarios because they “believed that multiple options would degrade the war plan.”³⁹ Jasper Welch, an Air Force general who was the Defense Department’s staff director for the review, protested that the Pentagon was assigning nuclear weapons to objectives according to what it thought the civilian leadership wanted: “The current SIOP calls for [nuclear] attacks on conventional forces. These have not been heavily targeted in the past because we had fewer warheads. As the MIRVs [multiple-warhead missiles] have come on line, and we get more warheads, the targets have grown. In current policy they will grow even further. SIOP is revised every six months and the planners have done what they could within the bounds of legality. I want to dispel any illusions anyone might have that there has been any lack of progress.”⁴⁰ Kissinger answered, “We are not sitting in judgment here,” but there was no way around the political math: the military had been mechanically piling up targets regardless of civilian concerns. In his 1974 final report to Nixon, Kissinger stressed that “until now, there has been no Presidential guidance on how the U.S. should plan for a nuclear conflict.”⁴¹ A week later, Nixon issued National Security Decision Memorandum (NSDM) 242, ordering the defense and intelligence communities to generate plans for more limited scenarios.⁴²

As Kissinger handled the White House end of things during the review in the summer of 1973, James Schlesinger became the first civilian professional strategist to lead the Defense Department. Unlike his predecessors, he held a doctorate in economics and had spent his career at the RAND Corporation, rather than in business or law. Schlesinger, too, understood the mismatch between the need to control escalation and a nuclear force designed to inflict large and immediate strikes across the Soviet Union at the first sign of trouble.

The search for the more variegated set of nuclear options called for in NSDM-242 led to a menu of scenarios for nuclear use that was briefly called “the Schlesinger Doctrine.”⁴³ This was less a “doctrine” than it was a purely declaratory attempt to squeeze credibility out of the existing strategic arsenal, and it did not produce any serious change in the nuclear force itself.⁴⁴ This resistance from the nuclear establishment was not the first time—nor would it be the last—that the Pentagon would smother orders to develop plans for contingencies other than all-out war, even at the regional level.⁴⁵ When Henry Kissinger, for example, asked the U.S. military for a “limited” nuclear option to deal with a notional Soviet invasion of Iran in 1974, the Joint Chiefs put forward a plan for nearly 200 nuclear strikes on a wide range of military targets inside the USSR near the Iranian border. “Are you out of your minds?” Kissinger screamed. “This is a limited option?”⁴⁶ Testifying before Congress in 1975, Schlesinger wondered if nuclear strategy, after years of extensive analysis that always produced the same unacceptable outcomes, had finally reached a “dead end.”⁴⁷

President Jimmy Carter came to office in 1977 believing both that the United States had too many nuclear weapons and that Americans themselves had “an inordinate fear” of communism.⁴⁸ During his briefing as president-elect, he even suggested that the United States could do with a submarine-deployed nuclear force of some 200 weapons, a proposal that reportedly left the chairman of the Joint Chiefs “speechless.”⁴⁹ Carter’s approach to arms control, however, was flawed from the outset, because he did not understand that he could not blast the Soviets on issues such as human rights while still seeking their partnership in negotiating limits on nuclear weapons. Carter would find in short order that the Soviet leadership, already irritated by the new president’s hectoring, was in no mood to cooperate with him on nuclear matters, not least because they saw themselves as an ascending power while the United States had just been through some of its most serious political and economic crises since the American Civil War.⁵⁰

In fairness, Carter inherited rather than created many of Washington’s problems with the Soviets. Carter’s immediate Republican predecessors had hoped their management of détente and the subsequent slowing of the arms race represented a new understanding between two great powers about maintaining the peace. The Kremlin, by contrast, saw détente as a strategic pause rather than a permanent state of affairs. As Carter came to office, the Soviet military surge of the previous fifteen years was nearing its completion. This included significant Soviet nuclear advances such as the SS-20, an intermediate-range, mobile, multi-warhead weapon that could reach almost all of NATO’s European capitals in minutes, and the SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile, a huge ICBM armed with at least ten highly accurate warheads.

The SS-18 in particular helped to fuel the panicky mathematics of the so-called “window of vulnerability” debate in the United States. The Soviet Union in the 1970s fielded more than 300 SS-18s, and with more than 3,000 warheads on these highly accurate missiles, the argument went, the Soviets had theoretically acquired the ability to destroy every U.S. land-based ICBM using only a fraction of their strategic forces. Their older and less accurate missiles could thus be held in reserve as a final threat against U.S. cities in order to coerce an American surrender. Whether the Soviets really believed they could do this and escape a full and final retaliation from U.S. submarines and bombers—to say nothing of British and French strategic forces—is unlikely, but to many of Carter’s critics the SS-18 and other Soviet nuclear improvements were symbolic of the unchecked growth of Soviet power and required a response.

By late 1978, Carter had been stung enough by Soviet behavior that he became a born-again Cold Warrior. He authorized work on several weapons systems in a vain attempt to catch up with the perceived American lag behind Soviet capabilities, including initiating the B-2 stealth bomber project, the huge ICBM known as the MX (later called “Peacekeeper” by the Reagan administration), and the deployment of improved U.S. nuclear arms in Europe.⁵¹ Politically, these programs came too late to deflect charges from Republicans as well as from conservative Democrats that Carter had pursued a feckless foreign policy, especially with the Soviets. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan seemed only to confirm the worst fears of Carter’s critics, and raised again the question of whether MAD truly stabilized superpower relations or merely encouraged the Kremlin to act yet more aggressively under the shield of the nuclear standoff.

In the midst of the 1980 U.S. election, Carter issued Presidential Directive 59 (PD-59), which ordered a complete reconceptualization of U.S. thinking about nuclear war. The result was a major declaratory shift in American nuclear doctrine, whether Carter had intended it to be or not. PD-59, sometimes called “the countervailing strategy,” upended nearly two decades of stated American policy by moving the United States away from MAD and toward a more confrontational approach that included planning for full-scale nuclear conflict.

PD-59 was based on a key political judgment about the USSR: it assumed that America’s enemies in the Kremlin valued the Soviet Communist Party’s continued control of Eurasia more than the lives of its own citizens.⁵² To this end, PD-59 tried to steer away from the retaliatory killing of millions of Soviet citizens envisioned in MAD by creating a kind of wishlist of political and military targets, including strikes on the Soviet political leadership in its bunkers as well as on a host of other locations ranging from military installations to important economic assets. American leaders had always been reluctant to adopt the same stoic approach taken by the Soviets regarding nuclear war, not least because of the moral horror involved with targeting civilians. Now, however, the United States would attempt to obviate this moral nightmare by sparing innocent Soviet civilians and targeting instead the guilty members of the Party and their police, security, and military forces. Nuclear deterrence would no longer rest on the promise to exterminate the citizens of the Soviet Union, but instead to eradicate the Soviet regime, root and branch, with Soviet leaders henceforth on notice that no matter what happened in a nuclear conflict, the outcome would include their own deaths and the end of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union once and for all.

The actual execution of the strategy envisioned in PD-59 was problematic to the point of absurd.⁵³ Targeting was bedeviled by the same problems encountered in the “no-cities” concept nearly two decades earlier; specifically, it was impossible to strike so many targets without wiping out most of the USSR in the process. The scope and number of targets slated for destruction rendered the whole idea of a “limited” nuclear war a gross contradiction. In reality, PD-59 was never actually meant to be a functioning strategy. Rather, it was a psychological gamble, an attempt to reestablish a more stable deterrent by convincing Moscow that the United States was not mesmerized by MAD, and planting in Soviet minds the possibility that American leaders were as willing as their Soviet counterparts to consider a protracted nuclear war.

The Soviets were apoplectic. After years of U.S. policies that stressed the impossibility of nuclear war, suddenly an American administration was planning and arming for one. Worse, many senior Soviet policymakers privately realized they were now facing a problem that they had largely brought on themselves through their own aggressiveness and recklessness. In later years, leading Soviet figures such as top Soviet foreign policy advisor Georgii Arbatov would admit that the Kremlin was reaping what it had so carelessly sown:

The thought of restraint, of moderation in military affairs, was absolutely alien to us. Possibly it was even our deeply rooted inferiority complex that constantly drove us to catch up with the United States in nuclear arms…. During those years we were enthusiastically arming ourselves, like binging drunks, without any apparent political need…. We, in essence, became participants in the “dismantling” of détente, actually helping the enemies of détente in the USA and other NATO countries to start the second “cold war.” The negative aspects of our foreign and domestic policies in those years had an obvious influence on the constellation of political forces and on the course of political struggles in the USA and other western nations; we strengthened the position of the right and the far right, even militaristic, circles.

“It must be acknowledged,” Arbatov concluded ruefully, “that Reagan, along with a whole cohort of the most conservative figures, came to power [in the 1980 election] not without our help.”⁵⁴

But there was much more to PD-59 than electoral politics. In rethinking nuclear doctrine in 1979 and 1980, the Americans were trying to solve a puzzle that they would face again in the twenty-first century while trying to deal with ruthless regimes such as North Korea: what deters a state that does not seem to value the lives of its own citizens? Since all of the answers involving nuclear weapons led to the indiscriminate killing of millions of people, none of them were acceptable. Even the most hardened realists were uncomfortable with the moral implications of MAD, regardless of how despicable or brutal the character of the enemy regime. In 1979, Henry Kissinger foreshadowed his later call for eliminating nuclear weapons when he grimly declared that targeting civilians in a general nuclear war would produce more than 100 million casualties, and that “such a degree of devastation is not a strategic doctrine,” but “an abdication of moral and political responsibility.”⁵⁵

In a sense, PD-59 foreshadowed Ronald Reagan’s early antagonism toward the Kremlin’s leaders. Both Carter and Reagan focused nuclear strategy on the eradication of the Soviet regime itself, almost personalizing nuclear war as punishment for the sins of the Politburo and the Soviet high command while attempting to spare the lives of the Russians and other Soviet peoples who may not have been willing participants in Moscow’s aggression. Although the term was not used at the time or in the same context, PD-59 represented nuclear “regime change.” PD-59 made clear that an attack on the United States might not mean the end of the world, but it would definitely mean the end of Soviet Communism. The Soviet leadership was so alarmed by this turn in American strategy that by the time of the 1980 U.S. election they actually preferred Reagan over Carter, thinking that things could not possibly get worse.⁵⁶

They were, of course, wrong. They had terribly misjudged Reagan, who not only accepted the fundamental logic of PD-59, but expanded upon it.

The Second (and Last) Cold War

For most of his presidency, Ronald Reagan was misunderstood by his detractors as being overly enamored of nuclear weapons and too willing to think about using them. The truth was the exact opposite: he viscerally hated them, and wanted their complete elimination. (Journalist John Newhouse was the first to buck this conventional wisdom, when he dubbed Reagan “The Abolitionist” in a 1989 New Yorker article.)⁵⁷ But Reagan hated Communism almost as much as he hated nuclear arms, and until the nuclear-free utopia arrived, the fortieth president’s innate distrust of the Soviet Union led him to stake deterrence on unarguable American nuclear superiority.

In a famous 1982 speech in London, Reagan asked whether civilization was destined to “perish in a hail of fiery atoms.” For his part, Reagan intended to forestall that outcome by making it clear to Moscow that the dangerous—and in his view, morally indefensible—days of MAD were over. In the wake of a global Soviet expansion into the Third World dating back to the last days of President Gerald Ford’s incomplete presidency and the later Soviet humiliations of President Carter, “détente” had become a term of scorn among conservative Republicans as well as a fair number of defense-minded Democrats, many of whom later served in Reagan’s two administrations. Gone was any sense of managing some sort of arms control regime with the Soviet Union; if the Soviets wanted a second, more intense Cold War and a real military competition with the West, Reagan, backed by a new slate of more energetic and anti-Soviet leaders across much of NATO, would give them one.

Reagan and his advisors sought to neutralize the Kremlin’s perception that it had gained the psychological upper hand in the arms race, and to that end his officials played a tough game of public diplomacy about nuclear war. Sometimes, these moves were over the top: Undersecretary of Defense Thomas Jones, for example, calmly told the Los Angeles Times in 1982 that “with enough shovels” to dig crude shelters before a nuclear attack, “everyone’s going to make it.”⁵⁸ Reagan and his lieutenants sensed, correctly, that after the 1970s the Soviets were increasingly convinced that they were winning the Cold War. What Reagan did not understand, however, was how insecure the Soviet leaders were about the USSR’s position in the global competition against the United States, nor the degree to which his policies were inadvertently convincing the Kremlin that the United States was spoiling for a nuclear fight.

In early 1983, Reagan completed what Carter had started, and finally discarded the cornerstone of MAD. Seizing the same arguments made by the Soviets themselves in the 1960s, he embraced the possibility of national missile defenses and argued that constructing them was a moral imperative. Reagan upended the East-West nuclear competition by speaking of a future based not on deterrence but on defense, a world in which “free people could live secure in the knowledge … that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies.”⁵⁹ At the time, Reagan was both applauded as a hero and dismissed as a dunce. Nonetheless, his vision held a broad appeal for many Americans who were tiring under the intense strain of the decades-long nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union.

Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was initially dubbed “Star Wars” by its detractors, but despite this early ridicule, ballistic missile defenses have now survived as a key U.S. strategic goal for more than thirty years. The concept is unlikely ever to be abandoned by either U.S. political party, not least because there is now a bureaucracy dedicated to creating missile defenses, and bureaucracies rarely surrender their own existence willingly. But it is also undeniable that the idea is popular, now as it was then, with an American public that supports the reassuring promise of knocking down incoming nuclear missiles. This public support is understandable, as most people do not understand the costs or technical challenges associated with such defenses; indeed, a plurality of U.S. voters in the late 1990s supported missile defenses because they thought the United States already had them.⁶⁰

Reagan’s blistering rhetoric, combined with his administration’s adoption of Carter’s nuclear strategy and the subsequent additional challenge of SDI, convinced some of the key figures in the Kremlin that the United States was determined to launch a nuclear first strike against the USSR. Even before Reagan came to office, Soviet intelligence stations worldwide were given instructions to note any possible signs of an American nuclear attack; later accounts suggest that this paranoia was heavily centered in the KGB rather than shared throughout the Soviet government, but within a few years it was a consuming fear among many of the hidebound older leaders in Moscow.⁶¹ In late 1983, a NATO nuclear exercise code-named “Able Archer” triggered a Soviet nuclear alert in Eastern Europe, surprising Reagan and his advisors and serving as one of several incidents that convinced Reagan that he had to ratchet down tensions with the USSR.⁶²

U.S.-Soviet talks did not get far, not least because three successive Soviet leaders—Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko—all died in the five years of Reagan’s presidency. When the Soviet leadership chose the younger and more forward-looking Mikhail Gorbachev as their new chairman in 1985, both he and Reagan both moved quickly and jointly affirmed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” As Reagan’s second term drew to a close, the “abolitionist” was finally able to take steps to realize his dream, one he came to realize he shared with Gorbachev, and together they engaged in a significant step toward denuclearizing Europe. Both the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to remove their most threatening and destabilizing nuclear systems from the Continent in a landmark 1987 treaty, and both sides agreed to pursue further cuts in the future. Gorbachev, however, was soon consumed with trying to hold together the disintegrating USSR, and it would fall to Reagan’s successor, President George H. W. Bush, to complete the delicate task of helping to manage the peaceful collapse of a nuclear superpower.

The first President Bush acted with a speed and decisiveness that would rarely be seen again in the American nuclear establishment. Until 1990, nuclear reductions were difficult for the Americans to consider without progress on reductions in conventional forces, but once it was clear that Gorbachev was also going to remove a substantial part of the Soviet Army from Eastern Europe, Bush pressed ahead on nuclear arms and seized the brief window between the Soviet collapse in 1991 and the emergence of the new Russia in 1992 to start shedding Cold War nuclear weapons and practices.⁶³

As journalist David Hoffman later described, Bush took dramatic steps during the Soviet interregnum to initiate changes to the U.S. nuclear deterrent.

[Bush] launched a significant pullback of U.S. nuclear weapons, both land and sea. He did it without drawn-out negotiations, without a treaty, without verification measures and without waiting for Soviet reciprocity.

Bush announced the United States would eliminate all of its ground-launched battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons worldwide, and withdraw all those on ships; stand down the strategic bombers from high-alert status; take off hair-trigger alert 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles; and cancel several nuclear weapon modernization programs. The announcement meant a pullback of 1,300 artillery-fired atomic projectiles, 850 Lance missile nuclear warheads, and 500 naval weapons.

In one stroke, Bush pulled back naval surface weapons that the United States had earlier refused to even discuss as part of strategic weapons negotiations.⁶⁴

Bush also disbanded the institutional guardian of nuclear war planning, the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, and replaced it in 1992 with the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which would thereafter be responsible for all U.S. strategic nuclear weapons. The Air Force and the Navy would continue the day-to-day maintenance and control of their respective nuclear systems, but ultimate authority in time of crisis and war would rest with this new command.

The first Bush administration has since entered the history books as a committee of level-headed realists, including Secretary of State James Baker, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and others. In many subsequent depictions of the administration (including those of Bush and Scowcroft), these men and women formed a kind of college of foreign affairs cardinals whose policies rested primarily on cold calculations of U.S. national interest. In 1991, however, President Bush himself acted like anything but a realist. Reacting to the changing conditions of international politics, rather than to the distribution of power, he unilaterally discarded weapons and practices that had long ago ceased to serve any purpose.

George H. W. Bush was perhaps the most accomplished of all U.S. presidents in the field of foreign policy. Bush’s achievements were undeniable: he helped to reunify Germany, guided the final days of the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion, and organized the most successful United Nations coalition since the Korean War to eject the Iraqi army from Kuwait. But by 1992, his services were no longer required. Voting less than a year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and in the midst of a recession, Americans turned aside his re-election bid. Fifty years of war were over, the North American heartland was safe once again, and it was time to enjoy the fruits of peace and prosperity. The U.S. electorate was ready to turn its attention away from foreign affairs in general and from the nuclear arms race in particular. It even seemed to many people that the world had reached, in scholar Francis Fukuyama’s often-misunderstood phrase, “the end of history.”⁶⁵

History, as new U.S. President Bill Clinton would learn, had other plans.

The end of this “second” Cold War and the cessation of political hostilities finally halted the surreal arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it resolved almost nothing among American defense intellectuals, military planners, and policymakers about nuclear deterrence. The legacy of these intellectual divisions lives on in current arguments about nuclear weapons and deterrence. Is deterrence a condition that can be created independently, or is there a way it can be sized or tailored to fit each opponent? Is there a minimum level of nuclear force that guarantees safety? Do nuclear weapons really deter other states at all, and if deterrence fails, can they be used?

These questions, as will be seen, have remained central to a series of dedicated but ultimately frustrating attempts in Washington to make sense of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its purpose into the twenty-first century.