No Use
No Use
Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security
Thomas M. Nichols
PENN
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney.
Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nichols, Thomas M.
No use : nuclear weapons and U.S. national security / Thomas M. Nichols.—1st ed.
p. cm.— (Haney Foundation series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4566-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Nuclear weapons—Government policy—United States. 2. National security—United States. 3. United States—Military policy. 4. Nuclear disarmament—United States. 5. Security, International. I. Title. II. Series: Haney Foundation series.
UA23.N5495 2014
355.0′’170973—dc23
2013026524
For my father, Nick James Nichols, who saw the beginning of the nuclear age,and my daughter, Hope Virginia Nichols,who I hope will see its end
General Black: We’re talking about the wrong subject. We’ve got to stop war, not limit it.
Professor Groteschele: That is not up to us, General Black.
Black: We’re the ones who know most about it.
General Stark: You’re a soldier, Blackie. You carry out policy. You don’t make it.
Black: Don’t kid yourself, Stark. The way we say a war can be fought is making policy. If we say we can fight a limited war with nuclear weapons, we let everyone off the hook. It’s what they want to hear. We can just keep on doing what we’re doing, and nobody really gets hurt.
Groteschele: Are you advocating disarmament, General Black?
Black [pauses]: I don’t know.
—Fail-Safe (1964)
Contents
Introduction. Why Nuclear Weapons Still Matter
1. Nuclear Strategy, 1950–1990: The Search for Meaning
2. Nuclear Weapons After the Cold War: Promise and Failure
3. The Return of Minimum Deterrence
4. Small States and Nuclear War
Conclusion. The Price of Nuclear Peace
Preface
Although writing a book about the meaning of nuclear weapons has been in the back of my mind for years, I always hesitated about starting the project. A fair part of that reticence reflected the fact that much of what follows here could not have been written even a decade ago: not only did I think differently then about nuclear weapons during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, but there was much that we simply did not yet know (and still do not know) about the making of nuclear policies in the United States and the former Soviet Union. Nonetheless, I knew that the issues in this book have been coloring many of the other problems I’ve studied over the years. Whether writing about Soviet civil-military politics as I did at the start of my career, or considering the advent of a new international age of preventive war as I did in my most recent work, the use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of nuclear war were constant companions to the questions I was investigating.
Paradoxically, I nonetheless avoided writing specifically about nuclear weapons for quite some time, because the implications of their use are so complicated and immense that they tend to swamp all other conclusions about anything else. The new reality, for example, that the United States and other nations now think much more permissively about preventive war—that is, attacking other nations far in advance of an actual threat—logically raises the question of whether anyone would use nuclear weapons in such preventive attacks. But to focus on that possibility in the larger discussion of preventive war risks placing the momentous but slight possibility of nuclear use at the center of what should be a larger discussion about the use of any kind of force. Once we start to think about nuclear bombs going off, it gets a little harder to think about anything else.
I also shied away from a project on nuclear weapons because I did not want my work to be overly influenced by my own experiences coming of age in the shadow of global nuclear war. (Whether I’ve succeeded will be up to the reader, of course.) As I’ve written elsewhere, I grew up in an Air Force town that was home to a major Strategic Air Command nuclear bomber base. Like many communities that hosted the American nuclear deterrent, we didn’t like to think much about the weapons that were sitting up the road at the base, but we knew they were there and what that meant for us in the event of a war. The Cold War did not end until I was thirty, and until then I had never known anything but a world that was, at least to me, defined by the standoff with the USSR and kept at peace only by the protective shield of American nuclear power. While I was somewhat more comfortable writing about nuclear history, as I did in the late 1990s, I am not certain that I could have written about the future of nuclear weapons
