The Logic of Nuclear Terror

Roman Kolkowicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000199604
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1987, The Logic of Nuclear Terror presented a much-needed critical review of the premises, concepts, and policy prescriptions of deterrence theories and doctrines at the time. In particular, authors address: the historical validity, theoretical vitality, and policy-relevance of nuclear deterrence theories and doctrines; the ways in which technological and political change have affected the original concepts of nuclear war and deterrence strategies, and the ways in which such changes have affected policy and doctrine; and realistic alternative ways of thinking about strategy in the changing context of new military technologies and international politics.

The outstanding group of international contributors to this volume include both proponents and critics of current doctrine. The result is an unusually well-balanced and unique contribution to our understanding of nuclear deterrence theory and practice. As such, it will be of interest to students, policymakers, and teachers of international relations, defense and foreign policy, US-Soviet relations, and arms control and disarmament.

PART I
Historical and Theoretical Problems

CHAPTER 1
Intellectuals and the Nuclear Deterrence System

ROMAN KOLKOWICZ

One must stress a point that certain young historians have found difficult to grasp. Virtually all the basic ideas and philosophies about nuclear weapons and their use have been generated by civilians working quite independently of the military.

BERNARD BRODIE

Admiral Lewis Strauss, one-time head of the Atomic Energy Commission, relates how he witnessed “a meeting at the Walter Reed Hospital, where, gathered around a patient’s bedside, and attentive to his last words of advice and wisdom were the Secretary of Defense, his deputies, the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and all the military chiefs.” The central figure in this striking tableau was “a young mathematician who but a few years before had come to the United States as an immigrant from Hungary.” The patient was John von Neumann, a defense intellectual par excellence, and Admiral Strauss was moved to confess that he “never witnessed a more dramatic scene or a more moving tribute to a great intelligence.”¹ This scene is particularly noteworthy in light of the century-long American tradition of anti-intellectualism and deep disdain by the Establishment for the nonpragmatic and “nonserious” intellectual outsiders. This chapter examines the remarkable rise in the halls of power of a group of intellectuals and experts who were involved in the development of the theories and policies of nuclear war in the United States after World War II; it attempts to account for the sources of their great influence and to consider the broader implications of their rise to power.

INTRODUCTION

One of the most profound, and potentially dangerous, disparities in Soviet and American approaches to military and nuclear strategy lies in their fundamentally dissimilar historical approaches to the relationship between politics and war, that is, the uses of military power for given political objectives. As far as military strategy goes, “most Americans are neo-Jominians and neo-Uptonians,”² whereas the Soviets remain followers of the teachings of Clausewitz and of the neo-Clausewitzians among the Marxists and Leninists.

Baron Antoine Henri de Jomini, one of the most influential military strategists of the nineteenth century, maintained that the study and conduct of war was a science that could be reduced to fixed rules and mathematical formulas. He believed that although technologies and techniques of war might change, its “principles are unchanging.” This notion, that the study and conduct of war are a kind of science, derives also from the spirit of the Enlightenment and the positive, optimistic American (and English) tradition of democratic liberalism, which envisaged man’s ability to control, manage, and order society and forces of conflict by rational, scientific, and technological means. Aspects of this tradition in the nuclear era are embodied in the optimistic premises of crisis management and arms control and in the vast literature on nuclear deterrence strategies. This American fascination with exact control and manipulation of levels of violence, with computer models and complex scenarios of conflict, with the quantification of defense and war management, with war as a rather bloodless game involving largely money, machines, and management techniques, resulted in the development of nuclear war strategies that embodied, according to Walter Lippmann:

The perfect fulfilment of all wishful thinking on military matters; here is war that requires no national effort, no draft, no discipline, but only money and engineering know-how, of which we have plenty. Here is the panacea which enables us to be the greatest military power on earth—without investing time, energy, sweat, blood and tears.³

Although these early post-World-War II views of American attitudes to nuclear war have been somewhat modified by the eventual loss first of atomic monopoly and then superiority, followed by the evolving nuclear stalemate, the underlying basic beliefs have not changed very much: The requirement for the effective punishment of an aggressor, the unambiguous and certain disabling of an offender with minimal ease, and at minimal cost, is considered as valid today as it was in the immediate post-World-War II period.

The other major distinguishing characteristic of American strategic thought derives from the separation of strategy not only from politics, but also from the serious consideration of adversary interests, values, and motives. This follows the tradition of General Emory Upton, who believed that “war and politics are diametrically and fundamentally different.” This thesis, developed more than a century ago, had a profound effect on American military thinking, as expressed in an Army War College text that categorically asserted that “politics and strategy are radically and fundamentally things apart. Strategy begins where politics end [sic].” Americans grew up to believe that war is not a concern of political leaders and citizenry, but of military experts alone. As Michael Howard observed, “nuclear weapons have deepened this belief: too complex for the average citizen to comprehend, too awesome even to contemplate, war in the nuclear age has been perceived by many to be something done by ‘experts.’”⁴

Soviet strategic thinking has different historical roots; central to their strategic theorizing and military planning is the influence of Carl von Clausewitz and the neo-Clausewitzians in the Marxist tradition, including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. War and strategy, in their Clausewitzian conceptualization, did not constitute a science or a body of timeless principles. Clausewitz “rejected both the optimism and dogmatism of the eighteenth century theory” and held that war was neither a scientific game nor an international sport, but an extreme act of violence: “We do not like to hear of generals who are victorious without the shedding of blood,”⁵ because the resulting attitude leads to an underestimation of the terrible nature of war and could result in a false sense of security and control over events. Clausewitz was widely read and admired by the Marxists and by the Bolsheviks. Friedrich Engels, probably the most sophisticated student of military affairs among them and known as the “Red General,” defined the essential Marxist and Soviet approach to war and strategy, which he derived from Clausewitz and which he bequeathed to the Soviets:

Fighting is to war what cash payment is to trade, for however rarely it may be necessary for it actually to occur, everything is directed towards it, and eventually it must take place all the same, and must be decisive.⁶

This perception of the inevitability and horror of war is also rooted in the Russian historical tradition, as expressed by Tolstoy, who observed that:

War is the most terrible thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously … let war be war, and not a game.⁷

The current position of Soviet strategists on the unsuitability of “eternal principles” of war, and on the need to adapt strategy and doctrine to the given “objective” national and political conditions, goes back to their revolutionary origins and the creation of the Red Army. Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army, cited Clausewitz in arguing that “in practical military arts one should not drive the flowers and foliage of theory too high, one should rather keep them close to the soil of experience.” Moreover, in rejecting the notion of strategy as science, he pointed out that despite various claims, “none of the ‘national’ doctrines of war offered, or could offer, any ‘final truth’ about war. Each school of thought merely reflected temporary conditions of national existence.” He sarcastically criticized those among the Bolsheviks who were carried away by utopian visions of universal, scientific strategic systems. “If we check the ‘eternal truths’ of military science, we obtain not much more than a few logical axioms and Euclidian postulates. Such principles … may well be applied to matters very remote from the art of warfare.”⁸

Although contemporary Soviet strategic thought essentially retains this Clausewitzian tradition, it is not ignorant of Western strategic methodologies and concepts. Unlike Western strategy, which largely assumes the adversary thinks as we do, several Soviet research institutes have in the past two decades focused their attention on the studies pursued by American think tanks and military research institutes. On the occasion of the establishment of the Soviet Institute for the Study of the United States of America, several commentators in the Soviet press stressed the “great importance for the comprehensive and concrete study of the economies and politics of the United States of America” as one of the central tasks for Soviet researchers in strategic and international affairs “in whatever field they may be working.”⁹

But whereas both American and Soviet research institutes are concerned with strategic and foreign policy studies, the degree of their influence on defense and foreign policy making and on the development of strategic theory and doctrine is markedly dissimilar. The influence of United States think tanks and intellectuals was overwhelming and decisive in the immediate post-World-War II era and has continued to a lesser degree over recent years; the impact of Soviet research institutes remains marginal and is largely confined to public relations—serving as host institutions for visiting foreign VIPs—and to research and publication of technical and “scientific” studies of capitalist systems. The Party apparat and the military fully dominate the Soviet defense and strategic policy process and jealously guard their prerogatives, keeping the defense intellectuals and their think tanks at arm’s length.

It is important to inquire into the origins and implications of these striking dissimilarities between the American and Soviet approaches to strategy and war and their relationship to politics. Over the years, the Soviet Union and the United States have accumulated virtually endless quantities of data about each other’s military technologies, economic and technical capabilities, and the quantities and qualities of their respective weapons systems. And yet, in the final analysis, we seem to understand very little in regard to what purposes and by what kinds of concepts and values these capabilities are to be used. This chapter suggests that the key explanation for this troubling state of affairs lies in the different approaches to strategy and politics undertaken and rationalized by different kinds of experts in the two countries. In the Soviet Union, the dominant expert elites traditionally entrusted with the development and rationalization of strategic theories and policies have been, and remain, military professionals under the political guidance of the Party leadership. In the United States, on the other hand, in the postwar period, this function became dominated by civilian defense intellectuals, to the virtual exclusion of military professionals, under the ambiguous guidance of an ever-changing political leadership.

Given the basic premises and requirements of mutuality, interdependence, and equilibria in the logic of deterrence stability and mutual assured destruction, such fundamental asymmetries in United States and Soviet strategic theories and doctrines are profoundly disturbing.

INTELLECTUALS AND WAR: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

From time immemorial, intellectuals have stood by the side of political and military rulers and offered their advice and legitimating ideologies for the ruler’s authority. Even in the earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia and China, the scribe-intellectual played an influential role in contact with the people wielding political power, both in the palace and in the bureaucratic Great Organizations. In Mesopotamia, the ruler “in order to establish his rule firmly needed not only the military power … but also the bureaucratic know-how … and equally important, the royal ideology that was nurtured and elaborated on by scholars and intellectuals who catered to his needs.” The special expertise and services offered by these experts-scribes gave them important positions at the court “which offered them not only economic security, but also the reward of special status,” which, in turn, “fostered the development of the kind of abstract scholarship reaching into the purely abstract realm of mathematical astronomy.”¹⁰ The scribe-intellectual’s activities became essential for the proper functioning of the bureaucracies and of the military.

In The Twilight of Authority, Robert Nisbet states that from “at least the time of the ancient Greek Sophists, there has been a striking affinity in the West between war and its symbols, roles, and objectives, and a substantial part of the intellectual class.”¹¹ He further asserts that “an int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Historical and Theoretical Problems
• Part II Soviet and American Perspectives
• Part III The Future of Deterrence
• Index