1 Across the nuclear divide â strategic studies, past and present [1977]
A combination of accident and design has produced a transnational strategic studies community which has only the most casual acquaintance with strategic thought and action prior to 1945. In this article it is argued both that the continuities in international politics and strategy, pre- and post-1945, are far more important than are the discontinuities, and that therefore the disciplined study of pre-nuclear ideas and events could and should much improve our understanding of the structure of current and anticipated security problems. The identity of the political players changes, as do the characteristics of particular weapons, but such policy problem categories as the utility of force for the support of foreign policy, alliance management, the conduct of an arms race, the prosecution of limited war, arms control negotiations, and the accommodation of new weapon technologies, all have long pre-nuclear histories. Nuclear-age strategic theory has suffered severely from shallowness of its empirical base.
Relatively few strategists today deny, in principle, the salience of pre-1945 thought and practice. But, historical consciousness of more than a very cosmetic variety continues to be the rare exception in contemporary strategic and arms control analysis. It is, of course, somewhat contrary to the American âstyle,â which continues overwhelmingly to be pragmatic and optimistic in character, to suggest that the practice of bad old âpower politicsâ may be traced back as far as human literary and archaeological records extend â the past and the present essentially are one in terms of statecraft. An historical memory that stops at a postulated great divide in 1945 encourages aspirations for ânew erasâ and the like. Since the past provides the only evidence upon which theories may be constructed, the time is long overdue for strategists and arms controllers (if these be separate categories) to seek out the relevant past in a systematic fashion for the purposes of policy-science today. (This is not to deny the value of historical enquiry pursued for its own sake; the trouble tends to be that historical research for its own sake requires a massive effort of translation before its findings are organized in ways at all useful for those facing contemporary policy problems.)
The development of atomic energy for military purposes produced a discontinuity in individual weapon lethality unprecedented in history. For once, a clichĂ© opinion is correct. The introduction of the tactical formation of the phalanx, the stirrup, the cross-bow, gunpowder, the magazine rifle, the machine gun, the airplane, the tank, the hydrogen bomb, the ballistic missile, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) and precision-guided munitions (PGMs) â important though they have been â are all outclassed as âdiscontinuousâ events by the development of the atomic bomb. For the first time there was a divorce between the ability to punish and the ability to defend. As early as 1945â46, it was clear to the few individuals who devoted serious attention to the meaning of atomic energy for international politics that, whether or not the atomic bomb was employed, crises and wars between great industrial powers, and even those between small powers allied to or of great interest to the atomic powers, would be conducted under the shadow of âthe bomb.â Clearly the world had been changed by the atomic test of July 16, 1945 and then by the employment of the âLittle Boyâ against Hiroshima on August 6 and of the âFat Manâ against Nagasaki on August 8. But, just how had the world changed? Was the Second World War, just concluded and apparently overshadowed, instantly to be relegated to the happy hunting grounds of military antiquarians?
For the moment it is conventient to ignore as irrelevant the probable fact that until 1950â51 the United States did not have the atomic means on hand to wage a war with the Soviet Union to a successful conclusion (by any definition of âsuccessfulâ). With close to 300 atomic bombs as late as December 1950,1 the United States could neither defend Western Europe nor, necessarily, impose (promptly, at least) what a later generation was to term âunacceptable damage.â Nonetheless, looking to the longer-term, the apocalyptic visions held by many in 1945â46 were not inappropriate. The near-instant commentators upon the new age of strategy (or the dead end of strategy, perhaps) that were spawned briefly in 1945â46 and then the creators of the new strategic theory in the second half of the 1950s are both to be excused for their tendency to deny, implicitly or explicitly, the relevance of pre-atomic experience and thought. The former were grappling tentatively with total novelty, the latter with an apparently exponential growth of new and improved technologies. First and second wave theorists (i.e., those writing, respectively, in 1945â46 and in 1955â65) served well the causes of scholarship, of citizen education, and of public policy improvement. Many of the failures of thought and of execution lie elsewhere â in a later period; most particularly in a strategic studies community that was slow in producing a third wave of theory that would fill the lacunae and discipline the excesses of the second wave, and in policymakers who have declined, or were unable, to recognize the highly speculative and even ethnocentric basis of much of their theoretical working capital.2 Although each superpower could (of recent years, at least) inflict well in excess of 100 million fatalities on the other within a few hours at most, and presuming that the Soviet Union cannot make effective use of the civil defense facilities attributed to it by some Western analysts,3 one of the most noteworthy features of post-1945 international politics were the degree to which they resembled pre-1945 international politics. A healthy and necessary focus upon new weapon technologies has tended to encourage an off-hand dismissal of pre-nuclear experience, although one suspects that a rather casual acquaintance with historical study and an unhealthy fixation upon the putative mechanics of the Third World War may also have contributed noticeably to the ahistorical character of much of contemporary strategic studies. Policymakers and strategic analysts do and will insist upon borrowing from the past. In an ahistoric strategy community, analogies will be undisciplined. While the purveying of distorted versions of the 1950s and 1960s are attributable, in part at least, to political and doctrinal bias, distorted portraits of say, the inter-war years often are attributable to nothing more sinister than ignorance. For an example of dubious argument supported illustratively by incorrect history, one need look no further than to the Annual Defense Department Report, FY1976 and FY1977. The Secretary of Defense said that âDespite frequent use of the term âarms raceâ, the United States has not engaged in the life-or-death competition that occurred among the European powers in the 1930s.â4
The stakes in the arms competition of the 1930s were indeed of a âlife-or-deathâ character, but the competition was not waged in a âlife-or-deathâ manner by the Western powers. If one wishes to derive a single lesson from the arms race experience of the 1930s, it would be that the half-hearted conduct of a race against a wholehearted adversary is a prescription for disaster.5 The arms race in the 1930s, in and of itself, was no danger to peace. Indeed, had the race been conducted energetically and, above all, intelligently, by Britain and France, quite the reverse would have been the case. History can never instruct policymakers as to what should be done, but a disciplined, policy science-filtered history should diminish the ease with which officials may seek intellectual comfort from simple and misleading isolated analogies.
If it is correct, or at least highly plausible, to suggest that international politics really is a continuum of historical experience, then it follows that pre-nuclear statecraft and strategy is no less the subject of the contemporary strategist, a priori, than are MIRVs and cruise missiles. Without in any way endeavoring to play down the importance of the quantum jump in the lethality-to-weight of projectile ratio achieved with nuclear weapons, many of the features of the post- 1945 world which tend to be associated with the revolution in weaponry have, in fact, only a tenuous or partial connection with that revolution. For example, the extreme disfavor with which the general public in all NATO countries views the prospect of large-scale organized violence is a continuation of a secular trend that would seem to have been born in the mud of Flanders. Nuclear weapons have strengthened a healthy public distaste for inter-state combat, but such distaste was no less prominent a feature of the inter-war years (of the 1920s in particular).6 It may well be correct to claim that ârevolutionaryâ states7 are prevented, by the prospect of nuclear use, from prosecuting their ambitions to the point of major war. However, while granting the probable sobering effect of intimations of suicide, ambitions may still be forwarded by means of the threat of force on a very large scale, as well as by the actual employment of force on a small scale (implying a readiness to escalate and a willingness to accept high risks). It is a fact that the strategic studies community has produced, and continued to produce, a literature that tends to ignore pre-1945 thought and experience.
There is some danger that two threads of contention will be confused. First, one may argue that the geometry of world power has so altered in the second half of the twentieth century â over the first half and over all previous periods â that all major political, economic, and strategic problems are distinctive to this current period. History may be fun, but it can have no policy relevance (however defined). Second, one may assert that a nuclear age must differ from all previous ages because of the revolution in military affairs wrought by nuclear physics. If the Manhattan Project (and its Soviet equivalent) had failed, what would have been the character of postwar international politics?
The superpowers and war
In summary form, one may suggest that, first, the Soviet Union and the United States would have been superpowers, contending over the control of the Eurasian ârimland.â8 Second, the preeminence of the superpowers would have meant that the United States would have been an essential âbalancerâ in the power scales relating to Europe. Third, the new geography of power, with the intercontinental distances dividing the principal adversaries, would have ensured the development and procurement of long-range successors to the B-29 (e.g. the B-36 and so on)9 â the exponentially rising unit costs of which would have spurred the development of âunconventionalâ weapons (e.g. nerve gas). Fourth, although the inhibitions to general war would have been somewhat lower than was the case with nuclear arsenals, it is easy to exaggerate the probable propensity of both the United States and the Soviet Union to run very high risks of war in a nuclear weapon-less world.
The United States is not a superpower because it is a nuclear power of the first rank, but rather it is a nuclear power of the first rank because it is a superpower. The first detailed exposition of the superpower thesis was offered by William T.R. Fox in 1944, while the Manhattan Project was still top secret.10 Atomic weapons, and a temporary monopoly of those weapons, happened to coincide with the widespread public recognition of Americaâs superpower status. Lest the discussed arguments seem unbalanced, it is appropriate for a brief outline to be offered of the principal differences wrought in international politics by nuclear weapons.
First, no nuclear or nonnuclear power would dare to press a military campaign against a nuclear power to the attempted end of total victory. Second, no nuclear or nonnuclear power would dare to press a military campaign against a close ally of a nuclear power to the end of total victory â unless the strategic forces of that power were neutralized by the counterdeterrent of the âaggressor.â Third, because of the prospective costs of nuclear war, political and military action that could be held to impinge upon the interests (not even the âvital interestsâ) of a nuclear power would be conducted far more cautiously than would be the case in a nuclear weapon-less world. The threshold of the casus belli has risen markedly. Indeed, with respect to the relations between nuclear-weapon states, the very notion of the casus belli has lost nearly all meaning. Nuclear-weapon states do not go to war with each other: they might slide fearfully into combat via limited strikes for diplomatic purposes, but they could not afford the traditional unlimited implication of going to war.
The possibility of nuclear war, regardless of identifiable shifts in the strategic balance, the retuning of strategic doctrines, and the evolution of the arsenals, clearly strengthened greatly whatever may have been the predispositions to caution in foreign policy that were traceable to other causes. However, it would be a mistake to believe that statesmen prior to 1945, innocent of nuclear doomsday expectations, rushed like Gadarene swine down âcrisis slidesâ into war.11 Even before 1945, it was commonplace to observe that while victory was preferable to defeat, war tended not to pay. Short-war illusions were present in 1914, but it is well to remember that by 1914 the European political system had already endured a decade of acute international crises, none of which were permitted to slide into general war. The Anglo-French honoring of their guarantee to Poland in 1939 may seem almost trivial by comparison with the kind of immediacy of threat that would be needed to invoke similar action in the 1970s, but the Allied entry into war in 1939 was belated (in terms of a candidate casus belli) and fearful. It should be true that no leader could today expect to profit from major military aggression involving interests declared plausibly by a nuclear-weapon state to be vital to its security, but Hitler, and certainly the German people, did not rush joyously and unthinkingly into the Second World War. Hitlerâs calculations were in error, but calculations there undoubtedly were. The attack upon Poland was not intended to herald general war.
Some uses of history
The relevance of pre-nuclear thought and of commentaries upon pre-nuclear experience depend upon the character of the strategic studies in question. The closer the strategic analyst finds himself to military operations, the less relevant is he likely to find thought and experience that is distant in time. The realm of military tactics is likely to prove of policy-scientific interest only insofar as there should be lessons to be learned from the combat outcomes of asymmetries in tactical ideas and in the realm of the timely assimilation (or lack thereof ) of new weapons. There is general educational value in studying the military sociology of new technology. A systematic historical study of the claims for, and realities of, the tactical performance of new weapons should promote a prudent skepticism towards extreme opinions, but the limited utility of historical study must also be recognized.
For example, an analyst seeking to make sense of PGMs for NATOâs defense posture might ask what value history had for him. History-conscious strategic analysts could tell him that every weapon, or class of weapon, tends to catalyze counter-weapons; that with few exceptions, new âwonderâ weapons achieve their most effective performance when employed in combination with other weapons; and that pre-war prognoses of weapon effectiveness tend to be in error. The closest historical analogue to âthe PGM (claimed) revolutionâ was the introduction of the machine gun. Each was/is intended to prevent the tactical movement of the reigning âqueen of the battlefieldâ: infantry for the machine gun and tanks for the PGM.12 Doctrinal argument and a wealth of supporting analyses will be forthcoming from special interests. A weapon that is doctrinally inconvenient will be disparaged. Also, new weapons tend to be fitted into existing, inappropriate military organizational forms which reflect faithfully faulty tactical conceptions. PGMs should escape this fate, given the wide diffusion of interest in their deployment. However, it should be recalled that in the British army the machine gun was thought of first as an artillery piece and that the first tanks were widely considered to be machine-gun platforms for the support of the infantry.
Without in any way reducing the burden of detailed analysis of expected weapon effects, tactical air sortie, and loss rates, and the like, it should be of some assistance to a strategic analyst to know that the particular problem of what to make of PGMs is but one example of a class of problems pertaining to the introduction of new weapons. Furthermore, it must surely be of some value to know that there is a body of knowledge available to be tapped concerning the past introduction of new weapons; PGMs are not machine guns, but an awareness of how effectively or otherwise previous new systems were absorbed by the military should sensitize the analyst to the kind of pitfalls that await both the enthusiast and the pessimist (and to the tactically extra-rational considerations that tend to color particular opinions). Therefore, even at the level of the consideration of a specific technology, there is some relevance in the continuity of historical experience.13
Paradoxically, at the politico-strategic level of concern, distant thought and experience may be both more and less salient to current policy consideration than was the experience with particular new technologies and tactical forms. Many states, in different periods, have conducted arms competitions and engaged in arms control negotiations, but only one international security system at one point in time has had to accommodate PGM technology. However, there are some nearconstant factors which lend a familiarity to the set of problems faced by the interpreter of and the prescriber for âthe PGM revolution.â (To name but a few: mi...
