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Deterrence in the MIRV Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Benjamin S. Lambeth
Benjamin S. Lambeth
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

In one of the landmark contributions to the strategic literature of the late 1950's, Albert Wohlstetter advanced the disquieting thesis that the vulnerability of our strategic retaliatory force (then consisting largely of overseas-based manned bombers and rather primitive, unhardened IRBM's) to a well-orchestrated Soviet surprise attack had come to suggest worrisome implications for continued U.S. security. The credibility of a deterrent posture, he pointedly emphasized, presupposed the ability of the deterring power to convey to its opponent an absolute certainty that any attack, however massive, would be answered by an unacceptably devastating reprisal.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , January 1972 , pp. 221 - 242
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1972

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References

1 Wohlstetter, Albert J., “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Foreign Affairs, xxxvii (January 1959), 211–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 A. J. Wohlstetter, F. S. Hoffmann, R. J. Lutz, and H. S. Rowen, Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases, The RAND Corporation, R-266 (April 1954). A summary of this study may be found in Quade, E. S., “The Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases: A Case History,” in Quade, E. S., ed., Analysis for Military Decisions (Chicago 1964), 24–63Google Scholar. For an analysis of its impact on U.S. defense policy, see also Smith, Bruce L. R., The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Non-Profit Advisory Corporation (Cambridge, Mass. 1966), 195–240CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 The Eisenhower phase of this policy shift is discussed in Huntington, Samuel P., The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics (New York 1961), 88–122Google Scholar. On the Kennedy-McNamara phase, see Kaufmann, William W., The Mc-Namara Strategy (New York 1964), 47–101Google Scholar, and Enthoven, Alain C. and Smith, K. Wayne, How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961-1969 (New York 1971), 165–96Google Scholar.

4 MIRV is an acronym for “multiple individually-targetable re-entry vehicle,” a system which has the effect of multiplying the number of warheads deliverable by a single booster to separate aiming points.

5 On this last count, Secretary of Defense Laird has gone so far as to assert that U.S. security is “literally at the edge of prudent risk.” See Bernard Nossiter, “Laird Warns of Risks in Missile Delay,” The Washington Post, April 21, 1970. For a somewhat more measured statement of concern over the integrity of our deterrent, see also Wohlstetter, Albert J., “The Case for Strategic Force Defense,” in Hoist, Johan J. and Schneider, William, eds., Why ABM? Policy Issues in the Missile Defense Controversy (New York 1969), 119–42Google Scholar.

6 See, for example, York, Herbert F., Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race (New York 1970)Google Scholar.

7 This “four-fold” figure is a rough deduction from available data on U.S. MIRV deployment plans. The land-based Minuteman III ICBM is to be fitted with a MIRV package containing three individual warheads. The MIRV being developed for the submarine-launched Poseidon medium-range missile will carry up to ten warheads. However, not all of the delivery vehicles are to be MIRVed, and not all of those which will be MIRVed are to have the maximum possible number of warheads.

8 Quoted in “Reflections on the Quarter,” Orbis, xiii (Summer 1969), 401Google Scholar. This argument, incidentally, is highly suspect even on its own terms. The U.S. Minuteman force consists of 1000 missiles. The Pentagon's standard “worst-case” assumption is that 95 per cent of those missiles would be destroyed in a Soviet counterforce first strike using MIRVed SS-9S. If we accept that assumption as valid, then presumably 50 Minutemen would survive the attack. If we further accept the Pentagon's assumption that each of the surviving Minutemen would be 80 per cent reliable, then we could count on retaining a serviceable retaliatory force of 40 ICBM's (and of anywhere from 40 to 120 deliverable warheads)—hardly an overkill capability, but one large enough to wreak considerable destruction and, in any event, one clearly larger than Mr. Laird's statement would have us believe.

9 See, however, Wiesner, Jerome B., “Some First-Strike Scenarios,” in Chayes, Abram and Wiesner, Jerome B., eds., ABM: An Evaluation of the Decision to Deploy an Anti-Ballistic Missile (New York 1969), 70–83Google Scholar. Wiesner persuasively argues that even following the worst conceivable Soviet first strike between now and 1980, the United States could still retaliate with upward of 2500 megatons.

10 Leaving those other factors aside for the moment, it is not unreasonable to ask just how vulnerable such ICBM forces would stand to become in a MIRV environment. The greater the total number of warheads in any given MIRV package, the smaller each one of diose warheads must become in terms of nuclear explosive yield. The smaller each warhead becomes, moreover, the greater its accuracy must be in order to provide reasonable assurance of being able to destroy a hardened target. Consequently, it is far from certain that MIRV's will automatically provide a disarming capability against enemy land-based missiles. They will have to be highly accurate and their delivery systems will have to be consistently reliable. For some useful charts and figures which show the full enormity of these requirements, see Strategic Survey, 1969, Institute for Strategic Studies (London 1970). 30–33Google Scholar.

11 On this count, moreover, George Quester has pointed out the important and frequently overlooked fact that although improved warhead accuracies and the advent of MIRV systems indeed cast doubts on the long-term reliability of our land-based ICBM's as second-strike weapons, the same developments promise to increase the target coverage of our submarine-launched ballistic missile force by as much as a factor of ten. See his “Missiles in Cuba, 1970,” Foreign Affairs, XLIX (April 1971), 495–96Google Scholar.

12 Some concern has been expressed that the Soviet FOBS, or “fractional orbital bombardment system,” would dangerously reduce the reaction time available to the bomber force by combining a depressed-trajectory flight path with a back-door entry through the southern approach corridor to the United States where our early warning system is least concentrated. The planned introduction of over-the-horizon radar facilities and advanced missile-launch detection satellites into the U.S. early warning network, however, is expected to accommodate the FOBS threat adequately.

13 We might note in passing that the Soviet Union's persistent statements of concern in the SALT talks over U.S. forward-deployed fighter-bombers in Europe and aboard aircraft carriers may be read, among other things, as authoritative confirmation of the continued deterrent effectiveness of manned aircraft.

14 In what one is strongly tempted to regard as a classic technological reductio ad absurdum, the Defense Department has gone on record with the argument that the Soviet Union could conceivably upgrade its extensive anti-aircraft missile network to ballistic-missile intercept capability, and that these Soviet air defense missiles would consequently have to be included in any ABM limitation agreement. In private conversations, various Soviet spokesmen have tended to view this argument as a transparent attempt on the part of the Pentagon to complicate the SALT talks unnecessarily. Indeed, it stretches credulity to accept the notion that the Soviets could impart to an obsolete weapon—one which has shown a remarkably poor performance record even against U.S. fighter aircraft in the Vietnam war—a capability which many experts doubt the considerably more sophisticated U.S. ABM could provide. The Pentagon concedes its case to be “hypothetical.” See John W. Finney, “Dispute on Soviet Missiles Hampers U.S. Arms Stand,” New York Times, January 11, 1970.

15 For an informed and sophisticated survey of technical issues in the current arms debate, see Feld, B. T., Greenwood, T., Rathjens, G. W., and Weinberg, S., eds., Impact of New Technologies on the Arms Race (Cambridge, Mass. 1971)Google Scholar.

16 Quoted in Lapp, Ralph E., Arms Beyond Doubt (New York 1970), 58Google Scholar.

17 The U.S. intelligence community, for example, has been anything but unanimous in its appraisal of the Soviet strategic threat. Using the same intelligence data available to Secretary Laird, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Richard Helms, made the unprecedented move, in spring of 1969, of allowing himself to become publicly identified with the view that Defense Department projections of a Soviet first-strike capability were exaggerated. See Peter Grose, “U.S. Intelligence Doubts Soviet First-Strike Goal,” New York Times, June 18, 1969.

18 A critic might protest that while this argument indeed holds for threats of cold-blooded nuclear attacks “out of the blue,” it does not consider the possibility that a country could credibly threaten a pre-emptive nuclear strike against its adversary during an acute crisis in which its core values were at stake, and thereby reap bargaining advantages from its strategic nuclear forces which, under calmer conditions, would be unavailable. More specifically, he might accuse it of a “minimum deterrence” monism which overlooks the possible utility of those “Type II Deterrence” concepts advanced by Kahn, Herman in On Thermonuclear War (Princeton 1960), 126–60Google Scholar. In anticipation of such criticism, two points may be made. First, while the force-level requirements of Kahn's Type II Deterrence (i.e., the deterrence of provocative acts other than a direct Soviet attack on the U.S.) are substantially greater than those of mere deterrence against premeditated attacks “out of the blue,” they do not necessarily in any way depend on strategic “superiority” over the adversary. It is theoretically possible for a state to have Type II Deterrence without being superior, and equally possible for it to have superiority but not Type II Deterrence. (Indeed, it is noteworthy that Kahn never even mentions superiority in his discussion of the preconditions for Type II Deterrence.) Second, Type II Deterrence requires a credible first-strike capability, something we have already seen to be unattainable under conditions of stable nuclear stalemate. Even Kahn admits—in Thinking About the Unthinkable (New York 1962), 113Google Scholar—that under such conditions “the use by a rational (or at least rational-appearing) decisionmaker of Type II Deterrence will not be feasible.”

19 A report by the Georgetown University Center for Strategic Studies, for example, maintains that our Cuban victory constituted “a particularly vivid example of the political utility of military superiority based on advanced technology.” The Soviet Military Technological Challenge (Washington, D.C. 1967), 6Google Scholar. See also Raymond L. GarthofFs assertion that as a result of Khrushchev's forced removal of the missiles from Cuba, “the American strategic superiority was doubly confirmed: his ploy proved his need for such... missiles, and its failure not only denied them but bore impressive witness to the American superiority that compelled him to capitulate.” “Military Power in Soviet Policy,” in Erickson, John, ed., The Military-Technical Revolution: Its Impact on Strategy and Foreign Policy (New York 1966), 255Google Scholar.

20 Quoted in Abel, Elie, The Missile Crisis (New York 1966), 106Google Scholar.

21 The qualification is an important one. Whether or not the Soviets in fact had a guaranteed retaliatory capability, the uncertainty on our part obliged us to act as though they did.

22 A fair case can be made that the Soviet missile gamble in Cuba was the product of a wholly rational decision, given the evidence and beliefs which Khrushchev had to go on. His expectation of success was no doubt heavily conditioned by a calculation that the United States, having been badly burned once in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs debacle, would not risk a similar failure by opposing his deployment of the missiles. It may also have been enhanced by a belief on his part, reinforced by his earlier confrontation with President Kennedy in Vienna, that the American President was, at bottom, a callow youth wh o could be easily manipulated by the more wily Soviet ruler. If Khrushchev had had any reason to believe otherwise, he probably would not have made his move at all. As it was, the American response was in all likelihood totally unexpected by him. Rather than ask the standard question of why the Soviets put their missiles in Cuba in the first place, we might usefully consider an alternative question: what did we do (or not do) that led them to believe they could get away with it? In this regard, Bernard Brodie has pointedly observed that “our having made a bad prediction does not itself justify our calling the Russians ‘unpredictable.’” Escalation and the Nuclear Option (Princeton 1966), 49Google Scholar.

23 As Oran R. Young has aptly put it, “the United States succeeded in achieving ‘escalation dominance’ by placing the Soviets in a situation in which they could not improve their bargaining position by raising the level of conflict.” The Politics of Force: Bargaining During International Crises (Princeton 1968), 388Google Scholar.

24 Schelling, Thomas C., Arms and Influence (New Haven 1966), 98–99Google Scholar.

25 Kintner, William R., Peace and the Strategy Conflict (New York 1967), 222–23Google Scholar.

26 Quoted in Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Greenwich, Conn. 1965), 759Google Scholar. Indeed, practically all of the published memoirs of the Kennedy era point out President Kennedy's uncertainty during the crisis and his humility in victory. On the first count, Robert F. Kennedy related the President's statement that “if anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move. I am not going to push the Russians an inch beyond what is necessary.” Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York 1969), 127Google Scholar. On the second count, Theodore Sorensen observes that while many of the President's advisers felt—after the crisis had abated—that the U.S. victory would make Kennedy look “ten feet tall” in the eyes of the rest of the world (including, presumably, those of the Soviets), the President realistically maintained: “That will wear off in about a week, and everybody will be back to thinking of their own interests.” Kennedy was, in fact, so convinced that his success was a narrow and fortuitous one that he subsequently laid down a firm line against his administration's gloating over the victory. , Sorensen, Kennedy (New York 1965), 808–09Google Scholar. The notion that “nothing succeeds like success” seems to have had a compelling influence on the proponents of superiority. By every account, however, the outcome of the missile crisis was a close one, and our eventual victory was hardly foreordained. What would they have said if we had failed?

27 For further discussion on this point, see the excellent study by George, Alexander L., Hall, David K., and Simons, William E., The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy; Laos, Cuba, Vietnam (Boston 1971)Google Scholar.

28 Scowcroft, Brent, “Deterrence and Strategic Superiority,” Orbis, xiii (Summer 1969), 450Google Scholar, 453. There is, it should be pointed out, a serious counter-argument to this view that holds that “if both sides believe... the side with more missiles has more useable military power and can prevail in more situations, then the number of missiles each side has does affect the outcome of political bargaining.” Jervis, Robert, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton 1970), 231Google Scholar. In theory, this argument is hard to disagree with. In practice, however, it is only as good as its assumption is valid, and there is little evidence to suggest that such a constellation of beliefs has ever in fact existed in the East-West relationship. On the contrary, as we have seen, the United States has frequently been circumspect and the Soviet Union adventurous, even though the prevailing asymmetries of the nuclear balance would have suggested that the reverse should have been the case. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the notable ironies of the nuclear age that while both Washington and Moscow have often lauded superiority as a military force-posture goal, neither has ever behaved as though it really believed superiority significantly mattered in the resolution of international conflicts.

29 Among the few analyses that have recognized and sought to deal with this paradox are Jervis, Robert, “Bargaining and Bargaining Tactics,” in Pennock, J. Roland and Chapman, John W., eds., Coercion, Nomos XV (New York 1971)Google Scholar, and Scoville, Herbert Jr., Toward a Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (New York 1970)Google Scholar.

30 Carroll, Lewis, The Annotated Alice (New York 1960), 210Google Scholar.

31 McNamara, Robert S., The Essence of Security (New York 1968), 166Google Scholar.

32 Indeed, an argument can be made that the hypervigilance induced by this “mad momentum” often forces each superpower into what amounts, in effect, to an arms race with itself. Th e paradigm of this phenomenon is the case where superpower A develops weapon Y to counteract weapon X which it has, and which it assumes superpower B eventually will also have. More often than not, the net result is to provoke the adversary into actually deploying the weapon which such anticipatory countermeasures are intended to check. For discussion on this point, see Rothstein, Robert L., “The Scorpions in the Bottle,” The Washington Monthly, 1 (January 1970), 31Google Scholar.

33 For elaboration on the relationship between the proliferation issue and SALT, see Lambeth, Benjamin S., “Nuclear Proliferation and Soviet Arms Control Policy,” Orbis, xiv (Summer 1970), 298–325Google Scholar.

34 Discussion of this possibility and its potential value may be found in Kahan, Jerome H., “Strategies for SALT,” World Politics, xxiii (January 1971), 171–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Stone, Jeremy, Strategic Persuasion: Arms Limitations Through Dialogue (New York 1968)Google Scholar.

35 See, however, Holsti, Ole, “Cognitive Dynamics and Images of the Enemy,” Journal of International Affairs, xxi, No. 1 (1967), 16–39Google Scholar; Jervis, Robert, “Hypotheses on Misperception,” World Politics, xx (April 1968), 454–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rapoport, Anatol, The Big Two: Soviet-American Perceptions of Foreign Policy (New York 1971)Google Scholar. See also Ulam, Adam B., The Rivals: America and Russia Since World War II (New York 1971)Google Scholar.

36 For a detailed account of these developments, see Quester, George, Nuclear Diplomacy: The First Twenty-Five Years (New York 1970)Google Scholar.

37 Brodie, Bernard, “Strategy Hits a Dead End,” Harper's, ccxi (October 1955), 33Google Scholar, 37.

38 Bourne, Randolph S., War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915-1919 (New York 1964), 10Google Scholar.

39 For a useful background discussion on the genealogy of the “sufficiency” concept, see Stone, I. F., “Nixon and the Arms Race: How Much is ‘Sufficiency’?” The New York. Review of Books, xii (March 27, 1969), 6–18Google Scholar.

40 Quoted in Sherman, Michael E., “Nixon and Arms Control,” International Journal, xxiv (Spring 1969), 335Google Scholar. A similarly Kafkaesque example of this sort of rhetorical sleight-of-hand may be found in Hanson Baldwin's statement that while “the first and absolute requirement for any grand strategy tomorrow is ‘sufficiency’ in strategic weapons,... ‘sufficiency,’ in this context, must mean a clear-cut and visible U.S. qualitative and quantitative superiority. Equivocation on this issue risks the life of the nation.” Strategy for Tomorrow (New York 1970), 295Google Scholar. In the face of such blatant cases of disregard for the meaning of words, one is almost tempted, out of despair, to agree with the candid and undoubtedly revealing remark made by Deputy Secretary of Defense Packard when pressed by reporters for a definition of sufficiency: “It means,” said Packard, “that it's a good word to use in a speech. Beyond that, it doesn't mean a God-damned thing.” “Arms Sufficiency Defined,” The Washington Post, June 16, 1969.