Real War (24 page)

In the period immediately after World War II the United States engaged in a process of hasty unilateral disarmament. From 1945 to 1947 we reduced our conventional forces from 14.5 million to 1.8 million. This policy was justified in part because of our monopoly on atomic weapons.

We learned in Korea that atomic weapons are not enough to deter war waged with conventional weapons. The Korean War, and what it signified about the global designs of the Soviet Union, shocked the United States into building up both our conventional and our nuclear forces and establishing a global system of bases surrounding the Soviet Union. The Soviets still maintained far larger land armies, and in 1949 they had exploded their own atomic bomb. They lacked an intercontinental delivery system, however, and the vigorous United States effort enabled us to maintain unquestioned superiority in nuclear forces and the capability of projecting our power to any area of the world where our interests were affected. Until the early 1970s no one questioned that the United States was the most powerful nation in the world. The existence of this U.S. power deterred overt aggression and forced the communists to go under borders rather than over them.

Because of this superiority the United States was able to deter Soviet intervention in the Berlin crisis in 1948-1949, in the Mideast war in 1956, and in Lebanon in 1958, where local U.S. naval superiority also played a critical role. In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the 15-to-l U.S. advantage over the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons enabled Kennedy to face down Khrushchev.

By that time a Soviet nuclear buildup was under way; it was sharply accelerated after Cuba. Vasili Kuznetsov, the Soviet First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, told his American host, John McCloy, “You Americans will never be able to do this to us again.”

In spite of the threat of Soviet nuclear buildup, our own programs leveled off. As recently described by a former CIA analyst, “The U.S. approach under Secretary of Defense McNamara was one of unilateral restraint.”

In 1965 McNamara gave this justification for restraint: “The Soviets have decided that they have lost the quantitative race. . . . There is no indication that the Soviets are seeking to develop a strategic nuclear force as large as ours.” This was a massive, tragic miscalculation. It was compounded by what Dr. Fred C. Iklé, the former head of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, has described as a “massive intelligence failure.” For eleven years during the sixties and early seventies
the annual United States intelligence forecast grossly underestimated the number of offensive missiles the Soviet Union would deploy, as well as their entire strategic nuclear force effort.

The increase of Soviet military power vis-à-vis that of the United States is illustrated by a comparison of defense expenditures. The CIA has estimated Soviet defense expenditures over the last decade at 11 to 12 percent of GNP; other authoritative estimates place the Soviet defense effort in the 1970s in the 14-15 percent range, with reputable estimates of planned spending in 1980 reaching 18 percent of GNP. These higher figures are doubly sobering because of the past CIA tendency to underestimate rather than overestimate. By contrast, the United States defense budget declined from 9 percent of GNP in 1968 to 5 percent in 1978. Over the last ten years U.S. expenditures for defense in constant dollars (discounted for inflation) have fallen by a third, while the Soviet Union has continued its steady increase year after year. Between 1973 and 1978 it has been estimated that the Soviet Union spent nearly $100 billion more than the United States on arms procurement and construction, and an additional $40 billion more than we did on arms research and development. The problem is not only the greatest peacetime military buildup since Hitler's in the 1930s, but also a massive U.S. build-down. As Secretary Harold Brown put it in the 1980 Defense Department Report:

As our defense budgets have risen, the Soviets have increased their defense budget. As our defense budgets have gone down, their defense budgets have increased again. As U.S. forces in Western Europe declined during the latter part of the 60's, Soviet deployments in Eastern Europe expanded.

As U.S. theater nuclear forces stabilized, Soviet peripheral attack and theater nuclear forces increased. As the U.S. Navy went down in numbers, the Soviet Navy went up. . . . It is worth noting, moreover, that the growth in their defense effort has correlated quite closely with the overall growth of the Soviet economy, while the U.S. military effort has steadily shrunk as a fraction of our economy.

It used to be fashionable to claim that the Soviets only wanted to catch up with us. But in 1971 they caught up with the United States in total expenditures, and over the past half decade
they have outspent us by three times in strategic nuclear forces and by at least 75 percent in general-purpose forces. Since personnel and operations costs account for only about 30 percent of the Soviet military budget, compared to 60 percent for the United States, that differential is magnified when it comes to military hardware.

Looking at conventional armaments only, we now find that they have more major surface combat ships than the United States has, and twice the number of attack submarines, as well as a fleet of 70 potent cruise missile submarines—of which we have none. They recently launched a nuclear submarine that goes faster (40 knots) and dives deeper (more than 2000 feet) than anything the United States has. They also have more than twice as many men under arms as we have, and four times the number of artillery pieces. We produce 40 heavy and medium tanks a month; they produce 50 a week. In terms of strategic nuclear forces, the CIA estimated in 1978 that Soviet expenditures, exclusive of research, development, testing, and evaluation, were three times those of the United States, and had been two and a half times those of the United States for the past ten years.

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Since the mid-1960s, when McNamara initiated his policy of unilateral restraint, we have not been seriously competitive with the Soviets in the development of strategic forces. Since that time seven new types of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) have been put into service: three prior to the first strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT) and four since 1972, under the SALT I Interim Agreement. And yet a fifth generation of new Soviet ICBMs is under development. Also since the mid-1960s the Soviets have deployed four new types of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), three of them since 1972, three new types of strategic submarines, and the new long-range supersonic Backfire bomber, which is similar in many respects to the canceled American B-1, and three-fourths its weight. In the United States we have put only one new ICBM and two new SLBM strategic weapon systems into production since the mid-1960s: the Minuteman III ICBM, the Poseidon missile, and the Trident I missile, which is only now coming on line. Otherwise, we have stayed with the B-52
bombers of the 1950s and early 1960s, some of which are older than the pilots who fly them, and with ICBMs that reflect the design and deployment decisions of the early 1960s. We have canceled the B-1 bomber, deferred deployment of the new MX ICBM by at least three years, and slowed production of our Trident submarines.

From a position of unquestioned superiority in the early 1960s we have declined to what is at best a position of parity, and we face decisive Soviet superiority by the mid-1980s. This requires us to rethink the fundamental assumptions that lie behind the American notion of deterrence. We are now forced to think the unthinkable.

For the United States and the West Mayday is the international distress signal. For the Soviet Union it is the day of annual celebration of the international communist movement. Mayday 1985 could well see these two concepts blend into one.

Paul Nitze has pointed out with regard to the strategic balance:

Over the past 15 years it would not have profited either side to attack first. It would have required the use of more ICBMs by the attacking side than the attack could have destroyed. By the early 1980s that situation will have changed. By that time, the Soviet Union will be in a position to destroy 90 percent of our ICBMs with an expenditure of a fifth to a third of its ICBMs. Even if one assumes the survival of most of our bombers on alert, for sufficient time to launch an immediate response, and of our submarines at sea, for a much longer time, the residue at our command after a Soviet initial counterforce attack would be strategically outmatched by the Soviet Union's retained war-making capability.

In a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy Defense Secretary Brown pointed out that the Soviets have been embarked for more than a decade on a policy of building forces for a preemptive attack on U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Secretary added that by the early 1980s the Soviet Union would
possess sufficient numbers of the new SS-18 and SS-19 heavy missiles to assure the destruction of the vast majority of this country's land-based Minuteman ICBMs in a surgically precise surprise attack.

By 1985, it has been estimated that with or without SALT II, the Soviets will have an advantage in their ICBM force of over 6-1 in countermilitary capability, of nearly 5-1 in throw weight, over 3-1 in numbers of reentry vehicles, over 5-1 in deliverable megatonnage, and equality in overall accuracy. The net result will be a major disparity in our first-strike capabilities, with the Soviet Union far ahead. The damage to our strategic stability and to our security will be a self-inflicted wound. By 1982, it is now conceded, our ICBM force will be thoroughly vulnerable to a first strike; our aging B-52 force (of which only 20 percent is kept loaded and on ground alert) will be vulnerable on the ground and en route to target; our strategic warning and communications system will be susceptible to attack and disruption; and Soviet antisubmarine warfare capabilities may not permit smug confidence in the survivability over time of our submarines at sea, approximately 50 percent of the force. In any case, the specter of an overwhelming Soviet strategic reserve—at least ten times our own after a first strike—would reduce the threat of retaliation from surviving U.S. forces. And Soviet active and passive defenses would reduce their impact if they were used.

As Henry Kissinger testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on July 31, 1979:

Rarely in history has a nation so passively accepted such a radical change in the military balance. If we are to remedy it, we must first recognize the fact that we have placed ourselves at a significant disadvantage voluntarily.

At the beginning of the 1960s the United States and the Soviet Union selected two fundamentally different approaches to nuclear deterrence. The United States attempted to separate deterrence and defense. But the Soviets refused to do so and oriented their planning toward the ability to fight, survive, and win a nuclear war.

In American thinking, strategic nuclear superiority and the attempt to limit damage in the event of nuclear war were replaced
by theories of deterrence that emphasized the inevitability of massive civilian destruction. These theories were linked with an arms control-oriented belief that nuclear weapons beyond a necessary minimum lacked political or military utility. A theory of limitations emerged that restricted the role of nuclear weapons essentially to “deterrence only”—the threat of retaliatory punishment against an aggressor's society. This so-called assured-destruction retaliatory capability came to be measured largely in terms of population fatalities deemed sufficient to deter an initial
all-out
attack. Assured destruction did not apply to limited attacks, which was one of its major drawbacks.

It was then a short step to the assumption that Soviet leaders saw deterrence in the same way, or at least would with some help from the United States. An equally naïe belief that U.S. strategic efforts were the engine that drove Soviet responses led to the conviction that U.S. restraint would be reciprocated by the Soviet Union. If, according to this theory, U.S. action produced Soviet reaction, then American inaction was the necessary condition for reciprocal inaction. If the United States limited its nuclear capabilities essentially to the requirements of assured destruction, and if the Soviet Union were given the opportunity to match this capability, a stable situation of mutual deterrence would be created and this would encourage arms limitation agreements. For this to work, however, the Soviets would have to restrict their own strategic programs and objectives to assured destruction and refrain both from seeking superiority and from challenging the assured destruction capabilities of the United States. They did not. Instead, they used the opportunity to forge ahead toward nuclear superiority and the achievement of their own nuclear war-fighting objectives.

The Soviets reject the argument that both sides in a nuclear exchange would be losers. They believe that even nuclear wars can be fought for political objectives, that with careful preparation one side can win, and that the destruction that would be suffered by that side can be meaningfully limited. They believe that such a nuclear war-fighting, damage-limiting capability is not only the best deterrent and the best strategy in the event of war, but also the key to the effective political use of nuclear force. If a nuclear power has not prepared itself to survive
a nuclear war, it cannot rationally or credibly threaten the use of nuclear weapons against another nuclear power, for this could be an act of national suicide.

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There are three profound faults with the concept of mutual assured destruction (MAD). The first, of course, is that the Soviets have refused to go along with it, which alone destroys the concept. The second is that it is strategically and politically wrong. It leaves the United States with no reasonable options if deterrence should fail, and it supports no rational political or military objectives in the event of war. A rational deterrent cannot be based on irrational responses. What future American President, for example, would risk New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington to save Berlin? The third fault is that it is morally wrong. The United States should never place itself in a position where its strategy implies that the deliberate slaughter of civilians is a proper objective. Deterrence should not be based on such a threat. These two basic objections, the strategic and the moral, are linked. The Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote in the fifth century
B.C
.: “What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy. . . . Next best is to disrupt his alliances. . . . The next best is to attack his army. . . . The worst policy is to attack cities. Attack cities only when there is no alternative.”