even remotely comparable to a strategic bombing campaign. Instead, policymakers had to think about the instant and complete destruction of dozens of major cities from long distances, a horrifying concept never before encountered in the study or practice of war.
The essence of the American problem in this first decade after World War II was that unarguable nuclear superiority did not seem to buy very much security, especially in Europe. The newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization faced the conventional superiority of a Communist coalition that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Worse, the Western nuclear arsenal (Britain’s first bomb was detonated in 1952) did not seem to imbue the Soviet Union with any greater sense of caution: nuclear weapons did not thwart Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s gambles in Berlin, nor did they prevent the invasion of South Korea. The Americans and their allies, as Lawrence Freedman later wrote, felt they were “being forced into fighting the [Cold War] and would have to fight any future hot war according to ground rules laid down by the communists.”5 Years later, revelations from Soviet archives and interviews of former Soviet policymakers would show that the Soviets were in fact acutely conscious of the danger of war and particularly of nuclear war.6 But Stalin himself, bolstered by the crushing victory over the Nazis and the acquisition of a new European empire, was nonetheless willing to run significant risks even in the face of a nuclear near-monopoly.7
The U.S. solution at the time was the strategy of “Massive Retaliation,” first described in a 1953 U.S. National Security Council paper and enunciated publicly a year later in more detail by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. President Dwight Eisenhower’s initial “New Look” at strategy affirmed that nuclear weapons would be essential to repulse a Soviet attack on the U.S. and NATO. Dulles went farther, and warned that the utility of nuclear arms extended beyond the battlefield: they could even act as a general strategic deterrent. That is, a U.S. nuclear attack on a grand scale—“Massive Retaliation”—against the USSR or its allies would henceforth be the price for any kind of Soviet or Communist-sponsored aggression, anywhere in the world.
No longer would the Americans try to match the USSR man for man and pound for pound. Instead, Washington would try to exploit its nuclear superiority by using it to deter Soviet aggression. Moscow was put on notice that any major offenses (however they might be defined) by the USSR or its proxies against the Western allies would result in the United States exercising its “great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of [America’s] choosing.”8
The Americans really had little choice at the time. Even with mass conscription or huge increases in defense spending, there was no way to fight the Communist bloc on its own terms. Outmanned and outgunned, the West had no hope of protecting every possible corner of the earth from a hemispheric Sino-Soviet alliance. Korea, where Western arms had restored the status quo only by a whisker, was proof enough of that. Allowing the East to dictate the terms of every engagement would be disastrous. “If the enemy,” Dulles said in 1954, “could pick his time and his place and method of warfare—and if our policy was to remain the traditional one of meeting aggression by direct and local opposition—then we needed to be ready to fight in the Arctic and the tropics, in Asia, in the Near East and in Europe; by sea, by land, by air; by old weapons and by new weapons.”9 Massive Retaliation was an asymmetric solution to this asymmetric dilemma, with nuclear weapons threatened as the dire punishment that Western conventional forces could not guarantee.
As a concept, Massive Retaliation was simplicity itself. As an actual strategy, however, it lacked clarity and credibility. The most obvious and logical question centered on the nuclear threshold. What might trigger U.S. retaliation? An invasion of Europe, certainly, but beyond that? Aggression in Indochina? Soviet abuse of its own allies? Proxy warfare conducted by a third power? Massive Retaliation was a hammer, not a scalpel, and it could not be tailored for anything much less than a direct, punishing attack on the Soviet Union. The Americans themselves were not sure where the nuclear lines were drawn, as there were simply too many scenarios to contemplate. It is one thing to induce uncertainty in the opponent; it is another entirely to share that uncertainty. (As we will see in Chapter 4, the United States replicated this mistake four decades later in trying to gain political leverage from its nuclear arsenal against rogue states after the Cold War.)
The true Achilles’ heel of the whole strategy, however, was that it rested on the inherently unsustainable condition of U.S. nuclear superiority. Massive Retaliation, a deeply flawed concept from the outset, could only last until the USSR developed the ability to retaliate in kind. Soviet leaders accordingly developed a missile-centric doctrine focused on a swift and secure retaliatory capability. In 1960, the USSR established the Strategic Rocket Forces, described by the Soviet defense minister at the time as “unquestionably the main service of the Armed Forces.”10 America’s threats of nuclear punishment after 1960 would now have to be made in the teeth of an inevitable Soviet nuclear response, and Soviet-era authors themselves accurately described Massive Retaliation as defunct by 1960.
Massive Retaliation, never fully conceptualized and never executed, in short order became obsolete in the face of new Soviet capabilities. In the end, “Massive Retaliation” was less a strategy than an expression of desperation, and it could not last into the missile age.
The 1960s and the Rise of the Strategists
As the Soviet arsenal grew in both size and capability, U.S. leaders tried to salvage some sense of purpose for their own rapidly increasing nuclear stockpile. The American capacity to destroy the USSR with impunity was out of reach by the time President John F. Kennedy took office in 1960; he was told bluntly (and correctly) by his military advisors that even if the United States launched everything it had at every possible Soviet, Chinese, and Eastern European target, some portion of the Soviet arsenal was certain to survive and inflict horrifying amounts of damage on North America.11 Accordingly, nuclear strategy became a more evenly matched, two-sided game between the United States and the Soviet Union.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was determined in this period to wrest control of nuclear issues away from the military, whose approach to nuclear strategy consisted largely of making operational plans to match weapons to targets.12 Nuclear targeting was no small enterprise in itself; by the mid-1970s, U.S. nuclear war planners had marked 40,000 potential targets for nuclear destruction in the Soviet bloc.13 But targeting is not the same thing as “strategy,” and McNamara wanted decisions over nuclear issues vested in a growing class of civilian defense analysts and policy intellectuals. This set the stage for the rise of the U.S. nuclear strategists, who would generate the many scenarios and strategies that dominated American nuclear thinking well into the 1980s.
Military control of nuclear strategy was undesirable, but the arrival of the civilian strategists was no less problematic. Soon, the nuclear enterprise represented the worst of both worlds, with both military officers and civilian analysts melded into a single community of nuclear experts. To be sure, the Americans (and others) needed to develop greater expertise on nuclear questions, but the unique tribe of defense specialists that emerged in the 1960s soon developed their own language, culture, and customs, which contributed to a growing gulf between theory and policy.
The dispassionate analysis of the use of nuclear weapons, for example, required a new vocabulary, a kind of nuclear Newspeak. Expressions such as “launch on warning” and “counterforce” entered the lexicon, and terms such as “collateral damage” took on significantly amplified meaning. As Kaplan put it, the strategists “performed their calculations and spoke in their strange and esoteric tongues because to do otherwise would be to recognize, all too clearly and constantly, the ghastliness of their contemplations.”14 Much like taking a person through the classic stages of grief, thinkers such as Herman Kahn insisted that Americans had to move past denial and anger, and reach acceptance of the nuclear age. This process entailed calmly thinking through horrific scenarios in which millions of people
