No Use. Thomas M. Nichols
nuclear superiority, but with the arrival of Soviet-American nuclear parity, nuclear war plans were even less use to U.S. leaders in 1972 than they had been in 1962. The Pentagon, in trying to unite a number of various operational plans for each part of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, by the early 1960s had factored them all into a giant “Single Integrated Operational Plan” (SIOP) for nuclear war with the USSR, but they still envisioned horrendous amounts of destruction. President Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, were as dissatisfied with these war plans as McNamara had been before them, especially because of their inflexibility and their massive human costs. “Nixon,” historian William Burr has written, “was plainly troubled by the SIOP, especially the huge number of projected fatalities.”36
During Nixon’s second term in office, Kissinger finally ordered a complete review of strategic nuclear policy. At a meeting in summer 1973, Kissinger noted that Nixon had not been provided with any other nuclear options other than a full briefing on the SIOP “three or four years” earlier, which “did not fill him with enthusiasm.”37 The object, yet again, was to provide Nixon with more flexibility in the new conditions of Soviet parity and Mutual Assured Destruction so that he, or any U.S. president, would be able to deter the Soviets with something less than catastrophe. In a way, the new condition of parity created the old dilemmas of Massive Retaliation all over again.
The targeting process, as always, was still out of civilian control. Kissinger noted that the SIOP given to Nixon did not “distinguish between retaliation and first strike,” because it was an inflexible plan that required hitting every target in the USSR. At the outset of the 1973 meeting, Kissinger needled the Joint Chiefs representative, Vice Admiral John Weinel: “We have been discussing this topic for four years and have come to no conclusions. This is probably by JCS design.”38 (“You give us undue credit,” Weinel shot back, and Kissinger then pointedly noted that he had expected to see the JCS chairman, not a deputy, at the meeting.)
Kissinger wasn’t far wrong. As Burr points out, the Joint Chiefs had resisted coming up with more limited scenarios because they “believed that multiple options would degrade the war plan.”39 Jasper Welch, an Air Force general who was the Defense Department’s staff director for the review, protested that the Pentagon was assigning nuclear weapons to objectives according to what it thought the civilian leadership wanted: “The current SIOP calls for [nuclear] attacks on conventional forces. These have not been heavily targeted in the past because we had fewer warheads. As the MIRVs [multiple-warhead missiles] have come on line, and we get more warheads, the targets have grown. In current policy they will grow even further. SIOP is revised every six months and the planners have done what they could within the bounds of legality. I want to dispel any illusions anyone might have that there has been any lack of progress.”40 Kissinger answered, “We are not sitting in judgment here,” but there was no way around the political math: the military had been mechanically piling up targets regardless of civilian concerns. In his 1974 final report to Nixon, Kissinger stressed that “until now, there has been no Presidential guidance on how the U.S. should plan for a nuclear conflict.”41 A week later, Nixon issued National Security Decision Memorandum (NSDM) 242, ordering the defense and intelligence communities to generate plans for more limited scenarios.42
As Kissinger handled the White House end of things during the review in the summer of 1973, James Schlesinger became the first civilian professional strategist to lead the Defense Department. Unlike his predecessors, he held a doctorate in economics and had spent his career at the RAND Corporation, rather than in business or law. Schlesinger, too, understood the mismatch between the need to control escalation and a nuclear force designed to inflict large and immediate strikes across the Soviet Union at the first sign of trouble.
The search for the more variegated set of nuclear options called for in NSDM-242 led to a menu of scenarios for nuclear use that was briefly called “the Schlesinger Doctrine.”43 This was less a “doctrine” than it was a purely declaratory attempt to squeeze credibility out of the existing strategic arsenal, and it did not produce any serious change in the nuclear force itself.44 This resistance from the nuclear establishment was not the first time—nor would it be the last—that the Pentagon would smother orders to develop plans for contingencies other than all-out war, even at the regional level.45 When Henry Kissinger, for example, asked the U.S. military for a “limited” nuclear option to deal with a notional Soviet invasion of Iran in 1974, the Joint Chiefs put forward a plan for nearly 200 nuclear strikes on a wide range of military targets inside the USSR near the Iranian border. “Are you out of your minds?” Kissinger screamed. “This is a limited option?”46 Testifying before Congress in 1975, Schlesinger wondered if nuclear strategy, after years of extensive analysis that always produced the same unacceptable outcomes, had finally reached a “dead end.”47
President Jimmy Carter came to office in 1977 believing both that the United States had too many nuclear weapons and that Americans themselves had “an inordinate fear” of communism.48 During his briefing as president-elect, he even suggested that the United States could do with a submarine-deployed nuclear force of some 200 weapons, a proposal that reportedly left the chairman of the Joint Chiefs “speechless.”49 Carter’s approach to arms control, however, was flawed from the outset, because he did not understand that he could not blast the Soviets on issues such as human rights while still seeking their partnership in negotiating limits on nuclear weapons. Carter would find in short order that the Soviet leadership, already irritated by the new president’s hectoring, was in no mood to cooperate with him on nuclear matters, not least because they saw themselves as an ascending power while the United States had just been through some of its most serious political and economic crises since the American Civil War.50
In fairness, Carter inherited rather than created many of Washington’s problems with the Soviets. Carter’s immediate Republican predecessors had hoped their management of détente and the subsequent slowing of the arms race represented a new understanding between two great powers about maintaining the peace. The Kremlin, by contrast, saw détente as a strategic pause rather than a permanent state of affairs. As Carter came to office, the Soviet military surge of the previous fifteen years was nearing its completion. This included significant Soviet nuclear advances such as the SS-20, an intermediate-range, mobile, multi-warhead weapon that could reach almost all of NATO’s European capitals in minutes, and the SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile, a huge ICBM armed with at least ten highly accurate warheads.
The SS-18 in particular helped to fuel the panicky mathematics of the so-called “window of vulnerability” debate in the United States. The Soviet Union in the 1970s fielded more than 300 SS-18s, and with more than 3,000 warheads on these highly accurate missiles, the argument went, the Soviets had theoretically acquired the ability to destroy every U.S. land-based ICBM using only a fraction of their strategic forces. Their older and less accurate missiles could thus be held in reserve as a final threat against U.S. cities in order to coerce an American surrender. Whether the Soviets really believed they could do this and escape a full and final retaliation from U.S. submarines and bombers—to say nothing of British and French strategic forces—is unlikely, but to many of Carter’s critics the SS-18 and other Soviet nuclear improvements were symbolic of the unchecked growth of Soviet power and required a response.
By late 1978, Carter had been stung enough by Soviet behavior that he became a born-again Cold Warrior. He authorized work on several weapons systems in a vain attempt to catch up with the perceived American lag behind Soviet capabilities, including initiating the B-2 stealth bomber project, the huge ICBM known as the MX (later called “Peacekeeper” by the Reagan administration), and the deployment of improved U.S. nuclear arms in Europe.51 Politically, these programs came too late to deflect charges from Republicans as well as from conservative Democrats that Carter had pursued a feckless foreign policy, especially with the Soviets. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan seemed only to confirm the worst fears of Carter’s critics, and raised again the question of whether MAD truly stabilized superpower relations or merely encouraged the Kremlin to act yet more aggressively under the shield of the nuclear standoff.
In the midst of the 1980 U.S. election, Carter issued Presidential Directive 59 (PD-59),