exchange with a peer, the need for action is immediate and the later consequences are a distant consideration in the heat of a fight for national survival. Smaller nations, however, cannot threaten the U.S. system of government or the American state, and the decision to use nuclear weapons, except in dire cases of preemption of additional nuclear strikes, will turn heavily on the proportionality and cost of the consequences. Chapter 5 will consider the costs of nuclear responses and the alternative of conventional retaliation. If nuclear proliferation is to be stopped, the United States and its allies—and, one might argue, the Russians as well—are going to have to devote more thought to how rogues and their clients can be deterred or their arsenals destroyed without resorting to nuclear force.
The final chapter will consider the price of the proposals for nuclear peace put forward in this study. These costs, both financial and political, will be considerable, but not insurmountable. The most wrenching questions, however, will not be over dollars and weapons, but diplomacy, sacrifice, and self-image. Will the American people and their representatives be willing to become more pacifist and more warlike at the same time? On the one hand, ending the nuclear addiction means not only divesting the United States of large numbers of nuclear weapons, but ending almost seventy years of reliance on the absolute power of nuclear arms. On the other hand, it means that the United States must be ready to make good on real threats of military force—and accept the casualties it will produce among our own soldiers—against countries and groups that refuse to overcome their nuclear obsessions.
False Choices
Since the collapse of the USSR, questions over the future of nuclear weapons and their role in U.S. national security have been plagued by false choices. Nuclear pacifism or nuclear aggression? Missile defenses, or surrender to nuclear blackmail? Abolition of nuclear weapons, or uncontrolled proliferation? We no longer face the choice of “Red or dead”; indeed, even during the Cold War this was an artificial dichotomy in a world where the main question was, or should have been, how to avoid a nuclear war, no matter how it originated.33 But that does not mean the years of difficult choices are now over.
The underlying questions about nuclear force have remained much the same since 1945. What is the actual political role of nuclear weapons? Do they have any military utility? Can a moral allowance be made for the use of weapons that can kill thousands, even millions, and eradicate entire cities in an instant? During the Cold War, the danger of Armageddon competed with the question of national survival. The deterrent threat of mass killing did not represent the moral high ground or the nobler heritages of either Russian or American civilization. But as horrible as it was, nuclear deterrence was the unavoidable result of the intense struggle that emerged from the ruins of World War II.
Today, the world is less dangerous, but that reality has had little effect on thinking about the role of nuclear weapons in the national security policies of the United States and other nations. Global nuclear war, which seemed so possible only a quarter century ago, is now so remote a possibility that it seems almost pointless to try to imagine how it could occur. And yet, the former superpowers still plan for it. U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder and former Defense Department official Jan Lodal noted in 2008 that the United States “still has a nuclear force posture that, even with fewer nuclear weapons, retains all of the essential characteristics it had during the Cold War.”34 As of 2011, New START now limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 warheads, nested on each side in a Cold War triad of land-based missiles, bomber aircraft, and submarine-launched weapons. Counting weapons in storage, this number represents more than a two-thirds decline in the stockpile of nuclear devices since the height of the Cold War. Both sides, however, remain in their Cold War postures, and each retains enough nuclear capacity to destroy every major city in the Northern Hemisphere, and with them Western civilization itself.
The false binary choices of the Cold War should be behind us, but the systems and strategies of the Cold War remain. How did we come to this state of affairs? We explore the history of U.S. nuclear strategy and its enduring legacy in the next chapter.
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
