On Thermonuclear War

Herman Kahn, Evan Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351501781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: History

On Thermonuclear War was controversial when originally published and remains so today. It is iconoclastic, crosses disciplinary boundaries, and finally it is calm and compellingly reasonable. The book was widely read on both sides of the Iron Curtain and the result was serious revision in both Western and Soviet strategy and doctrine. As a result, both sides were better able to avoid disaster during the Cold War.

The strategic concepts still apply: defense, local animosities, and the usual balance-of-power issues are still very much with us. Kahn's stated purpose in writing this book was simply: "avoiding disaster and buying time, without specifying the use of this time." By the late 1950s, with both sides H-bomb-armed, reason and time were in short supply.

Kahn, a military analyst at Rand since 1948, understood that a defense based only on thermonuclear arnaments was inconceivable, morally questionable, and not credible.The book was the first to make sense of nuclear weapons. Originally created from a series of lectures, it provides insight into how policymakers consider such issues. One may agree with Kahn or disagree with him on specific issues, but he clearly defined the terrain of the argument. He also looks at other weapons of mass destruction such as biological and chemical, and the history of their use.

The Cold War is over, but the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, and the lessons and principles developed in On Thermonuclear War apply as much to today's China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as they did to the Soviets.

Part I
Three Lectures

Lecture I
The Nature and Feasibility of Thermonuclear War

CHAPTER I
Alternative National Strategies

Introduction

ON July 16, 1960 the world entered the sixteenth year of the nuclear era. Yet we are increasingly aware that after living with nuclear bombs for fifteen years we still have a great deal to learn about the possible effects of a nuclear war. We have even more to learn about conducting international relations in a world in which force tends to be both increasingly more available and increasingly more dangerous to use, and therefore in practice increasingly unusable. As a result of this continuous secular change in the basic structure of the international situation, foreign and defense policies formulated early in the nuclear era badly need review and reformulation.

In considering these basic foreign and defense policies it is desirable to distinguish many different military postures and the corresponding possible strategies for both the United States and the Soviet Union. This treatment of thermonuclear warfare will mostly concern itself with four typical possible postures, which I will call Finite Deterrence, Counterforce as Insurance, Preattack Mobilization Base, and Credible First Strike Capability respectively. I will discuss the possibilities and implications of these postures from the point of view of the Soviet Union and the United States. While there is no reason why the two most powerful nations should have similar views, I will not initially dwell on possible asymmetries, deferring discussion of the separate national problems. A number of typical basic postures (important concepts italicized for emphasis) are listed in Table 1, roughly in order of increasing ability to wage general war.

Probably the most valuable thing that the Executive Office could do to improve over-all defense planning would be to select one of these postures and the corresponding strategies, or possibly some clearly defined alternative not on the list, and let the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, the Department of Defense, and the Department of State know its decision. The decision could then be debated at the proper level, and it would not be necessary to conduct a philosophical debate at the staff level, on what business the Department of Defense should be in every time somebody brought up a technical question on Air Defense, Command and Control, and so on. National debates should be conducted at the national level where feasibility, desirability, and possible consequences can be discussed responsibly and from proper points of view. It is not possible to do this even at the level of a senior but technical advisory group attached to Departments or even to the

TABLE 1
Alternative National Postures^a

Internal Police Force plus “World Government” Minimum Deterrence plus Limited War plus Arms Control Add insurance to the Minimum Deterrent: for reliability (Finite Deterrence) against unreliability (Counterforce as Insurance) against a change in policy (Preattack Mobilization Base) Add Credible First Strike Capability “Splendid” First Strike and no Limited War Capability Dreams

a I am indebted to Richard B. Foster of Stanford Research Institute for the suggestion to make a list of this sort. He has used a somewhat different breakdown in some unpublished investigations on the actual strategic views held by U.S. decision makers.

Executive Office, much less at lower staff levels. Advisory groups and agency and departmental staffs should be mainly concerned with implementing the general policy and reporting back to their superiors on cost, performance, and feasibility. In actual practice the great national debate on what business the Department of Defense should be in often occurs at the advisory group or relatively low staff levels, and important projects whose approval or disapproval may set crucial constraints on over-all policy are approved or rejected on the basis of some very narrow and parochial views of what this over-all national policy ought to be; sometimes the effects on over-all national policy are not even examined. All of this could be eliminated if the big decisions were consciously formulated, debated, and then decided at the proper level rather than treated as a number of fragmented issues to be treated on an ad hoc basis.

In this first chapter I will consider the postures in Table 1 from an over-all point of view, deferring details to later chapters. In this discussion I will define certain widely used terms in a manner that disagrees with some (but not all) usage. In general, I feel it is better to do this than to invent some completely new word or term, and I will normally continue this practice throughout the book. One of the most important things that could be done to facilitate discussion of defense problems would be to create a vocabulary that is both small enough and simple enough to be learned, precise enough to communicate, and large enough so that all of the important ideas that are contending can be comfortably and easily described. One of my major objectives in writing this book is to facilitate the creation of such a vocabulary.

1 Internal Police Force plus “World Government”

There seems to be little point in discussing the view that finds a solution in a totally disarmed world. Neither our own emotional desires nor the fact that there are many earnest proponents for this policy should sway us toward a position that ignores some of the basic realities. It has probably always been impractical to imagine a completely disarmed world, and the introduction of the thermonuclear bomb has added a special dimension to this impracticality. Given the large nuclear stockpiles in the Soviet Union, the United States, and the British Isles, it would be child’s play for one of these nations to hide completely hundreds of these bombs. Even if some caches were found, one could not be sure that these were not decoys to allay suspicions, and yet there would be a great loathness to cancel the agreement just because “a few malcontents had conspired against the peace.” The violator would then have an incredible advantage if the agreement ever broke down and the arms race started again. This surely means that even if all nations should one day agree to total nuclear disarmament, we must presume that there would be the hiding of some nuclear weapons or components as a hedge against the other side doing so. An international arrangement for banishing war through disarmament will not call for total disarmament but will almost undoubtedly include provisions for enforcement that cannot be successfully overturned by a small, hidden force. Otherwise, it would be hopelessly unstable. Even if the problem of what we may call the “clandestine cache” were solvable, the writer still is of the belief that one could not disarm the world totally and expect it to remain disarmed. But the problem of the clandestine nuclear cache in itself makes total disarmament especially infeasible.

While total disarmament can be ruled out as an immediate possibility, one can conceive of some sort of international authority which might have a monopoly of war-making capability. Such a postulated international authority would have to have enough power to be able to overwhelm any nation that had reserved hidden destructive potential. An international agency with a near-monopoly of force might come from any of the following possibilities (listed in order of apparent probability rather than desirability): (1) a Soviet or U.S. dominated world arising most likely out of war; (2) some other kind of postwar organization; (3) an S.U.-U.S. combination which is in effect a world government, though it may not openly be called that; (4) some of the NATO nations and China added to the above combination as influential, if not equal partners; (5) the Haves against the Have Nots, most likely without exploitation, but with stringent arms control in which authority and responsibility are roughly proportioned to military and economic development and, perhaps, with aid to underdeveloped nations; (6) a sort of World Federal state where power is proportioned to sovereignty and population as in the U.S. Congress. However, it is most doubtful in the absence of a crisis or war that a world government can be set up in the next decade. There are to date no serious proposals along such lines.¹ Certainly the official suggestions occasionally put out by the Soviet and U.S. governments are not to be taken seriously as possible solutions.

While it may seem high time to spell out practical proposals for world government, no such attempt will be made in this book. While I believe that even a poor world government might be preferable to an uncontrolled arms race, I also believe that the practical difficulties are so large that it is a digression to dwell on such possibilities as a possible solution for the problems of the sixties. And the problems of the sixties are important! About the only way “world government” and other long-run considerations affect the kind of analysis done here is the avoidance of otherwise desirable short-term measures that might seriously hinder or foreclose desirable long-term possibilities. Even this modest ambition toward shaping the seventies is difficult to realize because there are controversies over where we want to be, as well as how to get there. However, there seems to be some consensus on what we are trying to avoid even if we cannot agree on what we are for. This book will concentrate on the problem of avoiding disaster and buying time, without specifying the use of this time. This seeming unconcern for long-term objectives will distress some readers, but some of our immediate problems must be understood more clearly than in the past if we are to control the direction in which we are going. It is the hallmark of the amateur and dilettante that he has almost no interest in how to get to his particular utopia. Perhaps this is because the practical job of finding a path may be more difficult than the job of designing the goal.² Let us consider, then, some of the practical military alternatives that we face in the 1960-1975 time period.

2 Minimum Deterrence plus Limited War plus Arms Control

This view, or the modest variant of it called Finite Deterrence, is probably the most widely held view in the West of what is a desirable and feasible strategic posture. Among the adherents to this position can be found most intellectuals interested in military affairs, staff people in the federal government, civilians who seek to qualify as “military experts” (including scientists and technicians), many military planners in the three services, and the vast majority of

The notion is dramatic: It is that no nation whose decision makers are sane would attack another nation which was armed with a sufficiently large number of thermonuclear bombs. Thus all a nation that is so armed has to worry about is insanity, irresponsibility, accident, and miscalculation. Even such a sober expert as General Maxwell Taylor expressed this view as follows:

The avoidance of deliberate general atomic war should not be too difficult since its unremunerative character must be clear to the potential adversaries. Although actual stockpile sizes are closely guarded secrets, a nation need only feel reasonably sure that an opponent has some high-yield weapons, no matter how indefinite their exact number, to be impressed with the possible consequences of attacking him.³

The above was written in 1956 but is quoted in a book he published in 1959. It is only fair to add that General Taylor’s views have changed and, as expressed in the book, now show much more concern with the problem of deterring general war than this quotation would indicate. He also mentions that it was very difficult for him to change his views and take the problem of deterrence seriously. It is even more difficult for laymen who do not have access to the same information to achieve this feat.

In general, the believers in Minimum Deterrence seem to view the deterrence of a rational enemy as almost a simple philosophical consequence of the existence of thermonuclear bombs. They argue that the decision to initiate thermonuclear war is such a momentous one—the risks are so great—that it is unlikely that such a decision will be affected by the relatively minor details of each side’s military posture. One is tempted to call this “the layman’s view,” since people holding it show only the slightest interest in such matters as the status of the alert forces, holes in the warning networks, the range of the bombers, reliability of missiles, the degree of protection offered by current arrangements for hardening, dispersal, and concealment, and the multitude of other questions that bother sober students of the problem of retaliation. Nevertheless, the Minimum Deterrence view is held by such a surprisingly large number of experts that it may be gratuitously insulting to call it a layman’s view.

An extreme form of the Minimum Deterrence theory is the view that the current strategic forces of the United States and the Soviet Union, if used, will automatically result in world annihilation or at least mutual homicide. In 1955, fifty-two Nobel laureates signed a statement (the Mainau Declaration) which included the following: “All nations must come to the decision to renounce force as a final resort of policy. If they are not prepared to do this they will cease to exist” There is a beautiful simplicity about this statement. It does not differentiate between attacker and defender, belligerent and neutral, Northern and Southern Hemisphere, but simply says all nations. It does not talk about degree of damage but simply says cease to exist.

Everybody recognizes that statements such as the above are sometimes no more than rhetoric. If this were all there is to it one would not worry. But belief follows language as much as the other way round. Contemporary phrases, used by both experts and laymen in describing war, expressions like “balance of terror,” “thermonuclear stalemate,” “suicidal war,” “mutual annihilation,” “inescapable end of civilization,” “destruction of all life,” “end of history,” “live together or die together,” and “nobody wins a suicide pact,” indicate a widespread inclination to believe that thermonuclear war would eventuate in mutual annihilation as the result of almost any plausible turn of military events. The view of the phrasemakers is reinforced by the use of deterrence analogies, such as two people on a single keg of dynamite—each with a button, two scorpions in a bottle, two heads on a single chopping block, or the bee that dies when it stings.

Popular literature has picked up the idea of ultimacy. An example is Neville Shute’s interesting but badly researched book On the Beach, which presumes and describes the total extinction of humanity as a result of all-encompassing and inescapable atmospheric radioactivity coming from a thermonuclear war. Many shorter pieces have been written along similar lines. Western (but not Soviet) reviewers and critics have almost uniformly taken the theme of world destruction seriously. These Westerners and their readers do not consider it a fantastic notion that nuclear war would mean the inevitable end of the world. The world annihilation possibility is considered to be a sober and accurate appraisal of the destructive power of existing weapons systems.

Not all agree, of course. In fact, some “diehards” are tempted to dismiss such a statement as the Mainau Declaration as an extremist expression of some left wing or radical scientists. This is too strong a denial. A cursory examination of the names of the signers indicates that this hypothesis does not seem tenable for a majority of them. The Nobel laureates who authored the “cease to exist” statement probably had more than rhetoric and literature in mind. Many of them had either made calculations or seen calculations (or at least thought they had) which indicated to them that world annihilation or some practical equivalent was a reasonably sober estimate of the results of nuclear war. Most of the signers would be willing to go before a technical audience with a defense of the “end of history” position as a sober estimate—and the believers in recovery and recuperation would often have some difficulty in documenting their side of the case. It is important to realize that there are “experts” who believe in world annihilation and who hold strongly to this view, experts who can and will argue their position vehemently, quantitatively, and often persuasively.

The automatic mutual annihilation view is not unique to the West. As we will see in Lecture III, Malenkov publicly introduced it to the Soviet Union several years ago, ap...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables
• List of Figures
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Three Lectures
• Part II Appendices
• Index