The Defense Of The West

Strategic And European Security Issues Reappraised

Robert Kennedy, John M Weinstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367291204
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000315837
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on their daily involvement with defense issues and their interactions with the military and political elements of the national security community, civilian and military defense analysts in the U.S. Army War Colleger Strategic Studies Institute offer a lucid analysis of the complex mosaic of strategic and European defense issues. Their contributions are probing, balanced, and provocative, designed for students of foreign and defense affairs, as well as for policymakers. In the first section of the book, the offensive and defensive aspects of the strategic balance between the United States and the Soviet Union are examined. Going beyond sterile, static weapons counts, the authors address the relationship between the overall disposition of military forces and deterrence and are attentive to possible future developments, including the impact of new technologies and changing Sino-Soviet relations that are likely to affect the U.S.-USSR relationship. The second section of the book focuses on crucial East-West defense issues within Europe: the balance of conventional and theater nuclear forces, prospects for European arms control, the impact of chemical weapons on deterrence and defense, and the fashioning of an effective nonnuclear NATO defense. The book concludes with a chapter that illuminates U.S.-West European historical and cultural divergences, explaining in a new way the political strains that frequently plague the alliance.

Part 1
Strategic Issues

The unrelenting growth of Soviet strategic nuclear power over the past two decades and concurrent perceptions of a decline in the ability of the United States to exercise the degree of influence on world affairs it did in the immediate postwar era have created serious concerns over the changing US-Soviet strategic relationship. Today, defense specialists are divided over the nature of the change which has taken place as well as the efforts that must be undertaken if security and stability are to characterize the US-Soviet relationship and if Western interests are not to be placed in jeopardy.

In this first section, the authors address the many aspects of the newly developing American-Soviet strategic relationship. In the section’s opening essay, Robert Kennedy examines the nature of and objectives behind the continuing buildup of Soviet strategic nuclear forces. He concludes that while the Soviet Union may be seeking some “margin of superiority,” deterrence of nuclear war remains a preeminent Soviet objective. Kennedy further contends that while US land-based strategic retaliatory forces have become more vulnerable to a Soviet preemptive attack, the Soviet Union does not yet have the capability to execute a disarming “first-strike.” In short, Kennedy maintains that the strategic balance is rather robust. Nevertheless, he believes that the United States must begin now to revamp completely its strategic forces while simultaneously engaging the USSR in serious arms control efforts if future strategic instabilities are to be avoided.

John Weinstein examines Soviet strategic weaknesses and vulnerabilities. According to Weinstein, there is no doubt that the massive Soviet military buildup undermines deterrence and stability. However, it is important to recognize that deterrence is a state of mind that incorporates more than quantitative force balances and asymmetries. He concludes that while it would be imprudent and potentially cataclysmic to overemphasize Moscow’s political, economic, and military weaknesses, recognition of those weaknesses is crucial to the fashioning of sensible and effective policies for dealing with our principal adversary.

In the next essay, Weinstein builds on his understanding of Soviet vulnerabilities and explores the relationship between civil defense and deterrence, and strategic stability. He analyzes the problems and potential effectiveness of Soviet, as well as US, civil defense programs and concludes that while civil defense measures are likely to reduce the number of casualties suffered in a nuclear war, they would not contribute much to making nuclear war a feasible policy option. Central to his thesis is that one must not confuse biological survival with national survival. Nevertheless, Weinstein holds that since Americans will evacuate high risk areas in the event of a nuclear crisis, it remains the responsibility of the government to minimize the chaos and deleterious effects with prior planning. Thus, the United States should undertake a modest population evacuation civil defense program.

No collection of essays on the US-Soviet strategic relationship would be complete without an exploration of the role China plays in the superpower balance. In this regard, Todd Starbuck identifies the relevant national interests and security objectives of the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. He then analyzes the near-term implications of China’s increasingly independent international strategy for Sino-Soviet relations, US-China relations, and the US-Soviet military balance. Finally, he examines China’s potential as a world power in the year 2000 and concludes that its emergence on the global stage may create a tripolar balance of power by the end of this century.

Daniel Papp explores the technical feasibility and future deterrent utility of strategic defense. He believes that strategic defensive measures present American and Western security planning with a staggering number of possibilities. According to Papp, however, the uncertainties pertaining to future ballistic missile defense technologies, the unknown deployment constraints, and potential costs make acquisition decisions highly problematic. Indeed, except in the improbable circumstance in which the United States and the Soviet Union deploy strategic defensive systems simultaneously, the deployment of such systems is likely to lead to instability. Thus, Papp concludes, a major effort to deploy strategic defensive systems is clearly a double-edged sword. Consequently, the United States would do well to reexamine the merits of current strategic defensive initiatives as well as to explore the potential for effective arms limitations in this area.

In the closing essay Robert Kennedy examines the problems associated with attempts to limit strategic armaments. Despite the myriad difficulties, however, strategic arms limitations are as much a political act as they are a function of overcoming technical complexities. And while the political environments in Moscow and Washington suggest that the superpowers may be impelled toward agreement in the near future, Kennedy finds little evidence that the goals set in Washington or the Kremlin have been framed as part of a long-term strategy to secure balance and stability at the strategic level. Thus, although an agreement may be reached, the United States and the Soviet Union will continue to be disappointed with the results.

1
The Changing Strategic Balance and US Defense Planning

Robert Kennedy

On March 31, 1982 President Reagan, addressing the US-Soviet strategic nuclear relationship, asserted that the Soviet Union had achieved a “definite margin of superiority.”¹ Previous presidents had been concerned about the growth of the Soviet strategic arsenal. Indeed, President Reagan had warned earlier that the United States was entering a period known as the “window of vulnerability,”² in which its land-based missile forces would be increasingly vulnerable to a Soviet preemptive first strike. This was, however, the first time an American president had suggested that the United States had actually fallen behind the Soviet Union in strategic might.

The President’s assessment was quickly challenged.³ James R. Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense during the Ford Administration, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Carter, felt that the President had overstated the case. Dr. Schlesinger, noting the differences in the strategic arsenals of the two superpowers, said that these differences made it virtually impossible to determine which side was stronger. He said, “Neither side has superiority. It is a standoff.”⁴ Similarly, Dr. Brzezinski stated that “the situation is one of ambiguous equivalence.”⁵ Even Senator Henry Jackson, known for his tough stance toward the Soviet Union and strong support for defense, criticized the President, arguing that US quantitative advantages in bombers and nuclear [weapons aboard] missile carry submarines balanced Soviet advantages in heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).⁶ Despite such criticisms, the President’s remark seemed to lend credibility to those who had warned that, as a result of the inadequate defense policies of previous administrations, the United States was rapidly becoming the inferior superpower.

The United States, indeed the entire Western world, had watched apprehensively the development of Soviet nuclear capabilities ever since the USSR exploded its first atomic weapon in 1949. From the mid- to late 1960’s, however, the unrelenting building of Soviet strategic power has been viewed with increasing alarm. Indeed, in the latter years of the Carter presidency, while the administration maintained that US and Soviet strategic forces were roughly equal in strategic capability, official statements reflected a mounting uneasiness over Soviet intentions and strategic capabilities and emphasized the need to modernize US strategic forces in order to reduce the vulnerability of these forces to preemptive attack.⁷ Thus, President Reagan’s assessment brought to sharp focus more than a decade and a half of increasing concern over the implications of the growing Soviet strategic arsenal.

Soviet Intentions

The current debate over Soviet strategic objectives can be traced to the findings of the so-called Team B, a team of “outsiders” which was asked to assist in the preparation of the 1976 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Soviet Union.⁸ According to the newspaper reports, the 1976 NIE stated flatly that, in the majority’s view, the Soviet Union was seeking strategic superiority. This judgment ran counter to all previous national estimates of Soviet intentions since 1950, which had apparently concluded the Soviet Union was seeking rough parity.⁹ It also appeared to contradict those who had argued that the Soviet Union had accepted some variant of MAD with its emphasis on deterrence and stability.

The NIE reflected, in part, a number of concerns increasingly voiced by Major General George J. Keegan, Jr., Paul Nitze and others in and outside of government. General Keegan, then Chief of Air Force Intelligence, intrigued by the findings of Albert Wohlstetter in his “Legends of the Strategic Arms Race”¹⁰ and reflecting on the evidence that Air Force Intelligence had assembled, had been arguing that a formal audit be conducted of every NIE produced since the first. He believed that such an audit would reveal that the intelligence community not only had consistently underestimated Soviet strategic nuclear capabilities (as Wohlstetter had contended), but that such an audit would reveal that the Soviet Union was pursuing superiority.¹¹

Like Keegan, Paul Nitze was also becoming concerned over growing Soviet strategic power. Nitze, who had served as a member of the US SALT delegation from 1969 to 1974 and as Deputy Secretary of Defense for two years before that, had been skeptical of Soviet intentions since the days of NSC-68.¹² As Soviet strategic power continued to grow so did Nitze’s concern over the US inability to understand and meet the challenge. In March 1976 Nitze and others of similar mind formed the Committee on the Present Danger. Nitze was designated chairman of the Committee’s policy studies and in its first statement the Committee made clear its view of Soviet intentions. The Committee warned that the principal threat to world peace was the Soviet drive for dominance based on an unparalleled military buildup.¹³ Nitze believed that the SALT II Agreement then being fashioned was an inadequate constraint on the Soviet Union’s strategic nuclear capabilities. He also believed that the Soviet Union was pursuing a war-winning capability designed to give them a strategic advantage they would be “duty bound” to exploit.¹⁴

In the wake of his participation on Team B, Professor Richard Pipes offered further support for such views. In a seminal piece in Commentary in 1977, Pipes suggested that differences between American and Soviet strategies are traceable to different conceptions of the role of conflict and its inevitable concomitant, violence in human relations; and secondly to different functions which the military establishment performs in the two societies.¹⁵ He contended that

The Soviet ruling elite regards conflict and violence as natural regulators of all human affairs: wars between nations, in its view, represent only a variant of wars between classes….¹⁶

The strategic implications of such a view of conflict, according to Pipes, is a rejection by Soviet leadership of the Western view that nuclear war is unthinkable and that the application of force is prima facie evidence of failure of rational analysis and patient negotiations. Rather, according to Pipes, the Soviet Union views war, even nuclear warfare, according to Clausewitz’s classic dictum—that war is politics pursued by other means.

Pipes further argued that support within the Soviet Union for large offensive forces and the rejection of the theory of mutual deterrence is driven by a combination of political, institutional, and technical factors. Lacking a tradition and a popular mandate, the Soviet elite needs and wants a large armed forces which serve as the mainstay of the regime’s authority. At a time when its ideology is declining in appeal and its goods are noncompetitive in world markets, the Soviet Union sees large forces as the principal instrument of its external policies.¹⁷ For this reason alone, Pipes argued

…the Soviet leadership could not accept the theory of mutual deterrence. After all, this theory, pushed to its logical conclusion, means that a country can rely for its security on a finite number of nuclear warheads and on an appropriate quantity of delivery vehicles; so that, apart perhaps from some small mobile forces needed for local actions, the large and costly traditional military establishments can be disbanded.¹⁸

Pipes also identified other reasons that compel Soviet strategists to reject Western notions of mutual deterrence. First, mutual deterrence does not acknowledge the potential instability resulting from technological breakthroughs which may undermine a deterrent. Second, mutual deterrence is “passive.” It only threatens punishment to an aggressor after he has struck. The preferable objective of physically negating an attack requires an “active defense,” i.e., damage limitation through nuclear preemption. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• PART 1 — STRATEGIC ISSUES
• PART 2 — EUROPEAN SECURITY ISSUES
• EPILOGUE
• Contributors
• Index