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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2014
Ever since President Eisenhower broached the “open skies” proposal in 1955, American “disarmament” policy has given prior emphasis—apart from diplomatic and propagandistic purposes—to the objective of stabilizing the military balance of power, as distinguished from the traditional objective of abolishing or reducing the arms that sustain that balance. So Secretary of State Herter on February 18, 1960, described the first goal of America's disarmament policy as creating “a more stable military environment” by reducing the risk of war resulting from a surprise attack launched by miscalculation or from the promiscuous spread of nuclear weapons production. And so on May 25 President Eisenhower took the occasion of the U-2 incident to reiterate the urgent need for an international agreement providing mutual assurance against surprise attack; and on September 22, in an address to the U.N. General Assembly, proposed a United Nations surveillance body to permit nations to prove to each other that they are not preparing to launch a surprise attack.
If stability is the objective, then arms control policy is clearly the logical complement rather than the antithesis of defense policy. Yet in the absence of an overall strategy of stability, linking arms control with military strategy, the two may work against each other. Thus in the context of recent developments in missile technology, stabilizing the military environment requires the American government to make a basic decision, not only about arms control, but about the whole strategy of deterrence, lest its concern for providing mutual assurance against surprise attack conflict with its reliance upon a nuclear response to discourage a wide range of aggressions.
1 New York Times, 02 19, 1960, p. 4 Google Scholar.
2 Radio and television address to the nation. Ibid., May 26, 1960, p. 6. Ibid., September 23, 1960, p. 14.
3 It should be noted that Churchill, unlike those who took his statement as a confirmation of the universal efficacy of massive retaliation as a deterrent, recognized that stability in the strategic sector of the military environment would create instability in the tactical sector unless local conventional forces were enlarged to deal with piece-meal, limited aggressions.
4 “Active” and “passive” deterrence are words invented in 1958 by John Grant, the Defense Correspondent of the London Times, and subsequently popularized in Parliamentary defense debates. See The Times (London), 10 15, 1958, p. 13 Google Scholar; October 16, 1958, p. 13. They are less precise but, perhaps, more descriptive than other designations of these two types of deterrence, such as Herman Kahn's Types II and III and Type I. As explained below, “negative” deterrence is my own invention.
5 “Strike first” and “strike-back” might be less confusing terms, since a “first-strike” can be construed to refer solely to a surprise attack that initiates hostilities, whereas it actually refers to a retaliatory nuclear attack against non-nuclear aggression as well; and “second strike” may be construed to refer to the second nuclear blow delivered by the state initiating the nuclear exchange, whereas, in the special sense, it refers only to the first retaliatory nuclear blow launched by the state receiving the initial nuclear strike. However, “first strike” and “second strike” are by now too firmly fixed in their special meaning to justify supplanting them.
6 A “counterforce” strike would be one directed against Russian missiles and planes (and their bases, command centers, and other supporting elements), as distinguished from “countercity” or “countervalue” strikes, which would be directed against fixed civilian targets—primarily, Russian cities and industrial facilities.
7 The most systematic exposition of a strategy of limited nuclear reprisals published is Kaplan's, Morton A. “The Strategy of Limited Retaliation,” Policy Memorandum No. 19, Princeton University Center of International Studies, 04 9, 1959 Google Scholar. The most thorough analysis of the strategy I have seen is contained in an unpublished manuscript by Glenn Snyder.
8 I agree with the current consensus that such local resistance forces should rely principally upon conventional weapons, reserving tactical nuclear weapons for selective retaliation in order to deter the enemy from using them and to induce him to limit and terminate an aggression that cannot be contained conventionally.
9 There are persuasive arguments for the United States giving her allies an equitable share in the control of a joint nuclear capability under central command as a means of dissuading them from seeking independent nuclear capabilities, of consolidating the alliance politically by relieving them of exclusive dependence upon America's and Britain's decision to employ nuclear weapons, and of enhancing NATO's collective second-strike capability and protection against “nuclear blackmail.” See, especially, Buchan, Alastair, NATO in the 1960's (New York, Praeger, 1960), chap, vGoogle Scholar, and the articles by Buchan, , Aron, , and Knorr, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, XVI (09, 1960)Google Scholar.
10 Aside from the moral opprobrium attached to a strategy that aims exclusively to inflict maximum damage, a minimum deterrent striking force might foreclose the possibility of responding to a Soviet first strike confined to military targets, with graduated counter-military strikes. Such a response could be the only way for the United States to avoid choosing between surrender and placing all its cities in jeopardy by initiating civil strikes, and the only way to enable both sides to terminate the war short of extended countercity exchanges leading to catastrophic destruction. It seems exceedingly unlikely that the Soviet Union would incur the great risks and costs of initiating a strategic nuclear war on the highly problematical supposition that the United States might not respond to counterforce blows with countercity blows; but it is conceivable that, if Russia did for some reason launch a first-strike counterforce attack, while sparing American cities, and then decide that she did not wish to engage in extensive nuclear exchanges, she might seek an advantageous settlement by confronting the United States with certain obliteration if the United States should strike at Russian cities. The proper American response to such a tactic might be to bargain with limited retaliation upon comparable military targets, rather than to launch an automatic all-out attack intended to win the war or inflict maximum damage. For this purpose the United States would need some counterforce capability that was expendable without diminishing her countercity capability.
11 Thus on January 13, 1960, Secretary of Defense Gates, when asked to define the “deterrent gap” before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations, said, “If you can be satisfied that your deterrent power … will survive a surprise attack, regardless of what force he can attack you with, then you have no deterrent gap.” And he assured the committee that “even a surprise attack by all the missiles the Soviets could muster would not suffice to destroy enough of our retaliatory strike forces to enable him to make a rational decision to attack.” Subcommittee of the House Committee of Appropriations, Hearings, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1961, 86th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 4, 26, 136.
12 Digest of the Soviet Press, XI.
13 “On the Character of Modern Warfare,” International Affairs, X (10, 1960), 25, 26 Google Scholar.
14 Judging from the reciprocal interaction in the arms race thus far (for example, the Soviet decision to concentrate on building missiles instead of competing with SAC, or the American decision to base strategic capabilities on the downward revision of estimates of Soviet ICBM production in 1958), the United States and the Soviet Union would probably have sufficient knowledge of each other's weapons to limit the arms race reciprocally to the maintenance of second-strike capabilities and to determine whether such a limitation were being observed. As the concealment, mobility, and protection of missile bases, as well as their number and dispersion, increase, it should become increasingly easy to determine whether one side or the other were building a counterforce first-strike capability adequate for a surprise attack. Tacit agreements renouncing first-strike disarming capabilities could be implemented and reinforced by announced conditional unilateral limitations, by private talks among Soviet and American military and civilian personnel, by emphasizing anti-first-strike measures in disarmament discussions, and by unilateral measures designed to de-emphasize a first-strike strategy (chiefly, those negative measures by which states would conspicuously refrain from deployments and actions that threatened the adversary's second-strike capability). Thomas G. Schelling makes some suggestive observations on the value and tactics of tacit and informal arms agreements in “Reciprocal Measures for Arms Stabilization,” Daedalus, Vol. 89 (Fall, 1960), pp. 892–914 Google Scholar.
15 One technical difficulty in a formal agreement would be agreeing upon the ratio that represented a stable balance—a problem that has traditionally plagued disarmament schemes. The problem of ratio would be compounded by the fact that invulnerability is a product not only of relative numbers of missiles but also of qualities such as protection, dispersion, concealment, and mobility. It would also be compounded by the rapid rate of technological development in armaments. The development of an effective anti-missile device, for example, could vitiate the whole agreement.
A trustworthy inspection system capable of verifying the ratio without undermining the invulnerability it was intended to guard (especially by disclosing the location of missiles) would require a complex and exacting procedure. However, if such an inspection system could be devised, it would probably give more assurance of stability if there were no formal agreement on missile numbers and ratios, since this would leave the powers free to make adjustments in response to technological changes without violating an agreement and calling into question the whole basis of reciprocal restraint.
16 Properly speaking, negative deterrence is not deterrence at all, since to deter is to discourage a hostile action by frightening the actor. However, since there is no English word for preventing an action by negating or alleviating fear, there may be some advantage to calling such preventive assurance “negative deterrence” in order to suggest that fear and the negation of fear may serve the same purpose.
17 New York Times, 05 26, 1960, p. 6 Google Scholar.
18 Ibid., September 23, 1960, p. 14.
19 The Soviet doctrine of preemptive attack is discussed in Garthoff, Raymond L., Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age (New York, 1958)Google Scholar, and, at greater length, in Dinerstein, Herbert S., War and the Soviet Union (New York, 1959)Google Scholar, and Garthoff's sequel: The Soviet Image of Future War (Washington, D. C.: Public Affairs Press, 1960)Google Scholar.
20 See Thomas C. Schelling's seminal discussion of different kinds of safeguards against surprise attack, “Surprise Attack and Disarmament,” in Knorr, Klaus (ed.), NATO and American Security (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 The flight of manned bombers is a case in point. The Air Force has argued for the continued utility of manned bombers in the missile age partly on the grounds that, because they can be called back, they can be launched on less than certain warning information and also on the grounds that, in an airborne alert, they serve a psychological purpose as a visible sign on Communist radar screens of American preparedness. However, as Chief of Staff General Thomas D. White has conceded, these qualities might also be provocative, in that they could suggest that the United States was launching a first strike. Testimony on February 3, 1960, before the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, Senate Committee on Armed Services, Missiles, Space, and Other Major Defense Matters, 86th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 137–38.
22 The assumption that orbiting armed missiles render an adversary more vulnerable to a first strike—whether delivered intentionally, accidentally, or by miscalculation—than land-based or sea-based missiles probably has more to do with psychology than military logic. However, this does not make them any less provocative.
Even without inspection, both sides might have sufficient information to verify each other's adherence to the mutual abstention; for if the missiles were intended for deterrence, they would be announced; and, if they were not announced, the great number of missiles that would have to be orbited in order to be useful for an offensive surprise attack would arouse suspicions of their purpose.
23 Henry A. Kissinger and Thomas C. Schelling have suggested that, physically, such communication could be promoted by the establishment in the United States and the Soviet Union of observation and communications teams with special equipment capable of instantaneous communication to the Soviet and American governments and between the two. Kissinger, , “Arms Control, Inspection and Surprise Attack,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 38 (07, 1960), pp. 566–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schelling, , “Arms Control: Proposal for a Special Surveillance Force,” World Politics, Vol. 13 (10, 1960), p. 11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 In the articles cited above, Kissinger and Schelling outline such agreementa, designed to enable the parties to provide each other with positive evidence that they are not preparing a surprise attack.
25 For an analysis of SACEUR General Norstad's position on this point, see my “NATO: Problems of Security and Collaboration,” this Review, Vol. 54 (03, 1960), pp. 121–23Google Scholar; for Secretary of Defense McElroy's denial of the possibility of limited warfare in Europe, see his statements to the House Appropriations Subcommittee in April, 1958, Hearings, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1959, 85th Cong., 2d sess., p. 370, and in January, 1959, Hearings, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1960, 86th Cong., 1st sess., p. 68; see also his statements on May 29 and June 6, 1958, New York Times, 05 30, 1958, p. 3 Google Scholar; June 7, p. 9.
26 Remarks on the Berlin crisis in a press conference, New York Times, 03 12, 1959, p. 12 Google Scholar; remarks at state dinner in Manila, ibid., June 16, 1960, p. 14.
27 For explicit statements of the guiding concept of deterrence and deterrent capabilities by military and civilian officials, see Subcommittee on the Air Force, Senate Committee on Armed Services, Hearings, Study of Airpower, 84th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 10, 102; House Committee on Appropriations, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1960, pp. 71, 329–30, 477, 591, 594 Google Scholar; Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, Senate Committee on Armed Services, Hearings, Missiles Space, and Other Major Defense Matters, p. 194; Subcommittee of House Committee on Appropriations, Hearings, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1961, 86th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 4, 26, 36. In these hearings only Air Force spokesmen occasionally suggested that the purpose of a strategic striking force might also be to deliver a first strike in response to an attack upon America's allies or in order to preempt an imminent strike upon the United States: House Committee on Appropriations, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1960, p. 929; Department of Defense Appropriations for 1961, pp. 232–33.
28 The American government gave some credence to Soviet suspicions when, after the U-2 mishap, it argued, on the one hand, that the United States had been compelled to undertake the U-2 espionage program in order to get the kind of intelligence data that the Soviet Union could readily acquire by ordinary means in our open society and, on the other hand, that the unfortunate incident resulting from this necessity demonstrated the urgent need for an “open skies” agreement to secure the same kind of information on an international basis. Although the U-2 program was publicly justified in terms of gaining protection against surprise attack, the kind of information it evidently secured—for example, the construction of missile bases—could not give tactical early warning of a Soviet surprise attack in the missile age. On the other hand, this kind of information could be useful for an American surprise attack. In his radio and television address to the nation explaining the U-2 incident and the collapse of the summit conference, President Eisenhower, in comparing the ease with which the Soviet Union could acquire militarily useful information about the United States with the United States' difficulty in acquiring such information about the Soviet Union, referred not only to information about cities but also about such facilities as dams and highways; and, in showing the kind of vital information the U-2 could secure he displayed an aerial photograph of an American air base. New York Times, 05 26, 1960, p. 6 Google Scholar. Actually, it is not clear whether the U-2 program, at the time of its demise, was intended to be an instrument of a counterforce first-strike or second-strike strategy; but, as a general instrument of protection against a surprise attack, it was evidently a remnant of pre-missile technology, when surveillance of highways, communications centers, and bases might have given useful warning.
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