near the Iranian border. “Are you out of your minds?” Kissinger screamed. “This is a limited option?”46 Testifying before Congress in 1975, Schlesinger wondered if nuclear strategy, after years of extensive analysis that always produced the same unacceptable outcomes, had finally reached a “dead end.”47
President Jimmy Carter came to office in 1977 believing both that the United States had too many nuclear weapons and that Americans themselves had “an inordinate fear” of communism.48 During his briefing as president-elect, he even suggested that the United States could do with a submarine-deployed nuclear force of some 200 weapons, a proposal that reportedly left the chairman of the Joint Chiefs “speechless.”49 Carter’s approach to arms control, however, was flawed from the outset, because he did not understand that he could not blast the Soviets on issues such as human rights while still seeking their partnership in negotiating limits on nuclear weapons. Carter would find in short order that the Soviet leadership, already irritated by the new president’s hectoring, was in no mood to cooperate with him on nuclear matters, not least because they saw themselves as an ascending power while the United States had just been through some of its most serious political and economic crises since the American Civil War.50
In fairness, Carter inherited rather than created many of Washington’s problems with the Soviets. Carter’s immediate Republican predecessors had hoped their management of détente and the subsequent slowing of the arms race represented a new understanding between two great powers about maintaining the peace. The Kremlin, by contrast, saw détente as a strategic pause rather than a permanent state of affairs. As Carter came to office, the Soviet military surge of the previous fifteen years was nearing its completion. This included significant Soviet nuclear advances such as the SS-20, an intermediate-range, mobile, multi-warhead weapon that could reach almost all of NATO’s European capitals in minutes, and the SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile, a huge ICBM armed with at least ten highly accurate warheads.
The SS-18 in particular helped to fuel the panicky mathematics of the so-called “window of vulnerability” debate in the United States. The Soviet Union in the 1970s fielded more than 300 SS-18s, and with more than 3,000 warheads on these highly accurate missiles, the argument went, the Soviets had theoretically acquired the ability to destroy every U.S. land-based ICBM using only a fraction of their strategic forces. Their older and less accurate missiles could thus be held in reserve as a final threat against U.S. cities in order to coerce an American surrender. Whether the Soviets really believed they could do this and escape a full and final retaliation from U.S. submarines and bombers—to say nothing of British and French strategic forces—is unlikely, but to many of Carter’s critics the SS-18 and other Soviet nuclear improvements were symbolic of the unchecked growth of Soviet power and required a response.
By late 1978, Carter had been stung enough by Soviet behavior that he became a born-again Cold Warrior. He authorized work on several weapons systems in a vain attempt to catch up with the perceived American lag behind Soviet capabilities, including initiating the B-2 stealth bomber project, the huge ICBM known as the MX (later called “Peacekeeper” by the Reagan administration), and the deployment of improved U.S. nuclear arms in Europe.51 Politically, these programs came too late to deflect charges from Republicans as well as from conservative Democrats that Carter had pursued a feckless foreign policy, especially with the Soviets. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan seemed only to confirm the worst fears of Carter’s critics, and raised again the question of whether MAD truly stabilized superpower relations or merely encouraged the Kremlin to act yet more aggressively under the shield of the nuclear standoff.
In the midst of the 1980 U.S. election, Carter issued Presidential Directive 59 (PD-59), which ordered a complete reconceptualization of U.S. thinking about nuclear war. The result was a major declaratory shift in American nuclear doctrine, whether Carter had intended it to be or not. PD-59, sometimes called “the countervailing strategy,” upended nearly two decades of stated American policy by moving the United States away from MAD and toward a more confrontational approach that included planning for full-scale nuclear conflict.
PD-59 was based on a key political judgment about the USSR: it assumed that America’s enemies in the Kremlin valued the Soviet Communist Party’s continued control of Eurasia more than the lives of its own citizens.52 To this end, PD-59 tried to steer away from the retaliatory killing of millions of Soviet citizens envisioned in MAD by creating a kind of wishlist of political and military targets, including strikes on the Soviet political leadership in its bunkers as well as on a host of other locations ranging from military installations to important economic assets. American leaders had always been reluctant to adopt the same stoic approach taken by the Soviets regarding nuclear war, not least because of the moral horror involved with targeting civilians. Now, however, the United States would attempt to obviate this moral nightmare by sparing innocent Soviet civilians and targeting instead the guilty members of the Party and their police, security, and military forces. Nuclear deterrence would no longer rest on the promise to exterminate the citizens of the Soviet Union, but instead to eradicate the Soviet regime, root and branch, with Soviet leaders henceforth on notice that no matter what happened in a nuclear conflict, the outcome would include their own deaths and the end of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union once and for all.
The actual execution of the strategy envisioned in PD-59 was problematic to the point of absurd.53 Targeting was bedeviled by the same problems encountered in the “no-cities” concept nearly two decades earlier; specifically, it was impossible to strike so many targets without wiping out most of the USSR in the process. The scope and number of targets slated for destruction rendered the whole idea of a “limited” nuclear war a gross contradiction. In reality, PD-59 was never actually meant to be a functioning strategy. Rather, it was a psychological gamble, an attempt to reestablish a more stable deterrent by convincing Moscow that the United States was not mesmerized by MAD, and planting in Soviet minds the possibility that American leaders were as willing as their Soviet counterparts to consider a protracted nuclear war.
The Soviets were apoplectic. After years of U.S. policies that stressed the impossibility of nuclear war, suddenly an American administration was planning and arming for one. Worse, many senior Soviet policymakers privately realized they were now facing a problem that they had largely brought on themselves through their own aggressiveness and recklessness. In later years, leading Soviet figures such as top Soviet foreign policy advisor Georgii Arbatov would admit that the Kremlin was reaping what it had so carelessly sown:
The thought of restraint, of moderation in military affairs, was absolutely alien to us. Possibly it was even our deeply rooted inferiority complex that constantly drove us to catch up with the United States in nuclear arms…. During those years we were enthusiastically arming ourselves, like binging drunks, without any apparent political need…. We, in essence, became participants in the “dismantling” of détente, actually helping the enemies of détente in the USA and other NATO countries to start the second “cold war.” The negative aspects of our foreign and domestic policies in those years had an obvious influence on the constellation of political forces and on the course of political struggles in the USA and other western nations; we strengthened the position of the right and the far right, even militaristic, circles.
“It must be acknowledged,” Arbatov concluded ruefully, “that Reagan, along with a whole cohort of the most conservative figures, came to power [in the 1980 election] not without our help.”54
But there was much more to PD-59 than electoral politics. In rethinking nuclear doctrine in 1979 and 1980, the Americans were trying to solve a puzzle that they would face again in the twenty-first century while trying to deal with ruthless regimes such as North Korea: what deters a state that does not seem to value the lives of its own citizens? Since all of the answers involving nuclear weapons led to the indiscriminate killing of millions of people, none of them were acceptable. Even the most hardened realists were uncomfortable with the moral implications of MAD, regardless of how despicable or brutal the character of the enemy regime. In 1979,
