[LC]

point of view of the United States, as constituting formal recognition of its
responsibility for the peace and security of the Far East assumed during World War II
and its aftermath. To the world at large, they were evidence that the United States
had moved into a large section of the power vacuum left by the defeat of Japan.

The four Pacific treaties of 1951-1953 did not produce a closed system of
collective defense in that area. This was accomplished, albeit most imperfectly, by
the South-East Asia Collective Defense Treaty, signed at Manila, September 8, 1954,
which linked the security interests of the signatories of the Philippine and ANZUS
treaties with those of Britain and France and of the two south Asian countries,
Pakistan and Thailand. Although the three states of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia
were excluded from membership in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) by
the terms of the armistice agreement of July 20 that ended the Indo-Chinese civil war,
these states were specifically included in the area covered by the Manila Treaty.
The Republic of China, however, was as definitely excluded because Britain and France
both had recognized the mainland regime of the People's Democratic Republic of China.
Consequently, the United States felt it necessary, under pressure from the government
of Chiang Kai-shek, to conclude a mutual defense treaty with the Republic of China,
on December 1, 1954. This Formosa treaty completes the list of formal United States
collective defense commitments.

There remains, however, the Middle East. The United States was not a member of
the Baghdad Pact of 1955 between the United Kingdom, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan,
but it agreed from the beginning to participate in the meetings of two Baghdad Pact
committees--the Economics Committee and the Committee to Fight Subversion--and in
June 1957 began participating in the work of the Military Committee. Linked to NATO
by Britain and Turkey and to SEATO by Pakistan, the Baghdad Pact Middle Eastern
Treaty Organization, or METO, was meant to close a gap in the encircling containment
of the Communist Bloc of nations, of which the United States is the principal archi-
tect. In the interest of maintaining good relations with the Arab states of the
Middle East, all of which except Iraq looked upon the Baghdad Pact as an effort to
perpetuate British influence in the area, the Unit4d States has not become a member.
It has, however, enlarged its support of the Pact, as its efforts to reconcile the
aspirations of Arab nationalism with its own determination to limit the penetration of
Russian influence into the Middle East have met with indifferent success. Moreover,
the Middle East Resolution, or Eisenhower Doctrine, of March 1957--by which the
United States sought to repair the damage wrought by the fiasco of the British and
French invasion of Egypt in the Suez War of October-November 1956 and their igno-
minious withdrawal under combined pressure from the United States, the Soviet Union,
and the British Commonwealth--has been described by the Secretary of State as having
"as much effectiveness as membership in the Baghdad Pact organization".³

The Middle East Resolution declares that the United States "regards as vital to
the national interest and world peace the preservation of the independence and
integrity of the nations of the Middle East," and that the President may "use armed
force to assist any nation or group of nations requesting assistance against armed
aggression from any country controlled by international communism".⁴ The area of
the "Middle East" is not defined, but the political setting in which the Eisenhower
Doctrine was evolved makes it evident that the United States was, in effect, extend-
ing a unilateral guarantee to each Baghdad Pact power, as well as to any other
Middle Eastern government that might request help. Moreover, the landing of U.S.
troops in Lebanon in July 1958, upon the request of the government of that country
which was engaged in fighting a rebellion of its own subjects, has established the
precedent that U. S. military support under the Middle East Resolution may be forth-
coming in the event of threatened "indirect" as well as actual aggression, and that
the relation of the suspected aggressor to "international communism" may be no more

26

[LC]

explicit than the willingness of the Arab nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of the United Arab Republic of Egypt, Syria, and the Yemen, to purchase arms and to accept military and technical aid from the Soviet Union. Finally, it was announced at a meeting of the Baghdad Pact Council in London, July 28, 1958, at which Iraq was not represented (owing to the *coup d'etat* in Baghdad on the fourteenth of that month), but which was attended by the United States Secretary of State, that the U.S. planned to co-operate fully with the Baghdad powers "for their security and defense" and would promptly enter into agreements "designed to give effect to this co-operation".⁵

Although the wording of treaties is less important than the spirit in which they are written, it is of interest and of some importance to note the different verbal formulae by which the mutual obligations are expressed in the various treaties. The Rio and North Atlantic Treaties, which reflect U.S. national security interests long established--in the first case by the Monroe Doctrine, and in the second by participation in two World Wars--use the most explicit form of commitment. Article III of the Rio treaty says: "...an armed attack against an American State shall be considered as an attack against all American States." Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty uses essentially the same formula: "The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all." The later treaties have employed a more reserved formula, reflecting in part the inferior status of the areas they represent in the universe of U.S. national interests, and in part the misgivings of Senators who felt that the North Atlantic Treaty had gone too far toward suggesting that the United States might find itself at war without courtesy of Congress. In all of these, except the Japanese security treaty, each party recognizes that an armed attack in the area defined "would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would meet (or would act to meet) the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes". When the Japanese Treaty was signed, Japan had no armed forces with which to act to meet the common danger. The security treaty therefore authorizes the United States to dispose forces in and about Japan to be "utilized to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East and to the security of Japan against armed attack from without." For the same reason, it provides that "at the express request of the Japanese government" these U.S. forces may be used "to put down large-scale internal riots and disturbances in Japan, caused through instigation or intervention of any outside power or powers."

The Japanese Security Treaty is not, however, the only collective defense arrangement that authorizes the United States to station its troops on the territory of the other party. The same authorization is a feature of the bilateral treaties with the Republic of Korea and with the Republic of China. Its provision in an article of the treaties may not unfairly be taken as an indication of the basic lack of mutuality in the guarantees afforded. These three bilateral treaties, in other words, are U.S. security guarantees, more unmistakably so than the four multilateral treaties or even the Philippine treaty.

In addition to their operational articles, all these post-war (World War II) treaties pledge the parties to peaceful settlement of international differences. All provide for peacetime collaboration in one form or another "separately and jointly by self-help and mutual aid" to prepare for the contingency of an attack. All likewise acknowledge the superiority of the United Nations Charter and justify themselves by referring to the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter. Thus, all provide (a) that action taken to resist aggression will be reported promptly to the Security Council and (b) for the suspension of that action should the Security Council effectively assume responsibility. The multilateral treaties provide for an executive agency, called

27

[L.C.]

the "organization" in the Inter-American Treaty and the "Council" in the North Atlantic, ANZUS, and SEATO treaties. The Rio Treaty, however, is unique in its provision for action by a two-thirds vote (except that "no State shall be required to use armed force without its consent." In the other treaties the rule of unanimity may be assumed since the question of voting is not mentioned. Only the South-East Asia Security treaty explicitly recognizes threats "in any way other than by armed attack or ...any fact or situation which might endanger the peace of the area" and provides that the Parties will immediately consult in such cases "in order to agree on measures which should be taken for common defense." In a minute to this treaty the United States specified that the only "armed attack" it would regard as endangering its "peace and safety" and thereby requiring action "to meet the common danger" must be "communist aggression." Any other armed attack it would treat as a threat of the second order, just mentioned, calling for immediate consultation on measures to be taken rather than action "to meet the common danger."

The scope of this network of U.S. commitments is impressive. The United States has bilateral or multilateral security arrangements by treaty with forty-two separate nations. Including the United States, the Rio Treaty has twenty-one signatories; the North Atlantic Treaty fifteen (as of 1955 with the addition of the Federal Republic of Germany); the Manila Treaty eight; and to these must be added Japan, Korea, and Formosa. Moreover, the Manila Treaty extends its guarantees to an area and to a number of states which are not members of the treaty, provided they are willing to accept help, leaving the ultimate scope of even our treaty obligations indeterminate. When one adds the undefined limits of the "Middle East"--those nations which are invited to request assistance against "international communism" by the Eisenhower Doctrine--the sweeping inclusiveness of the Truman Doctrine, which gave rise to sharp criticism when it was pronounced in 1947, turns out to have been a reasonably accurate forecast of later collective defense commitments. Indeed, the limits of this policy of mutual assistance and defense have been authoritatively defined only once. That was when the people of Hungary rose in revolt against their Russian overlords in October 1956, and the United States Secretary of State let it be known that "we do not look upon these nations--i.e., the Russian satellites of Eastern Europe--as potential military allies."⁶ Later, President Eisenhower was to explain that military intervention was unthinkable so close to the borders of the U.S.S.R. because the Russians would almost certainly respond by starting World War III.

The policy of containment through collective defense evolved only gradually, and a satisfactory explanation of the growing network of commitments would have to treat each "doctrine" or treaty separately; nevertheless there is apparent a general rationale behind collective defense. It may be summarized in four major principals. First: the United States cannot expect to maintain its power position, and thereby preserve the kind of world in which it will feel safe, without either the help of allies or a reorganization of our national life in rough approximation of the Communist pattern so that we may be able to devote a larger portion of our national wealth to military and other instruments of national power, thus increasing our available strength at the expense of other values. Second: the non-communist world cannot defend itself against communist infiltration and subversion without our moral and material support, including military support. Third: the expansion of "international communism" by overt aggression is an imminent and dangerous threat to our security whenever local conditions in the non-communist world permit such aggression at minor risk to the major centers of communist power. Fourth: our bases on allied territory enable us to increase the military effectiveness and consequently the deterrent effect of our strategic retaliatory forces; at the same time the presence of these outposts and, in appropriate circumstances, other U.S. forces including ground troops, increases the credibility of our deterrent intent by evidencing our commitment to the security and integrity of the local political unit with which we are allied.

28

[LC]

These principles, as indicated, have been inferred from a survey of collective defense in its current form. This is not to say of course that there are no official statements which, at one time or another, have expressed one or more of these principles. A famous example is the "massive retaliation" passage from Secretary John Foster Dulles' speech before the Council of Foreign Relations, Inc., in New York, January 12, 1954. "We need", he said, "allies and collective security. Our purpose is to make these relations more effective, less costly...We want, for ourselves and for the other free nations, a maximum deterrent at a bearable cost." This is one way of expressing what has been called the first principle here. We shall revert to its special application to the nuclear deterrence commitment that the Secretary of State was justifying. Again, three years later, when he was presenting the Middle East Resolution to the Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and the Armed Services, Secretary Dulles remarked:

> Experience indicates that a nation rarely, if ever, loses its independence
> (1) if that nation is not exposed to open armed attack by overwhelming force;
> (2) if it has loyal and adequately equipped forces for at least internal security; and
> (3) if the economic situation does not seem hopeless.

In connection with an appeal to Congress to sanction economic and military aid coupled with a security guarantee to the countries of the Middle East, this statement fairly accurately reflects our second principle while also suggesting the third-- though the threat of overt aggression is less prominent in the Secretary's presentation because he was responding to the argument that aggression was not the problem in the Middle East and consequently that military aid and a security guarantee were not what was required.

Passages might similarly be chosen, almost at random, from all the great and minor documents of containment, beginning with President Truman's address to Congress on aid to Greece and Turkey of March 12, 1947 ("At the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one."), moving on to Secretary of State George C. Marshall's address at the Harvard Commencement in June 1947 proposing economic aid to the free nations of Western Europe, down to President Eisenhower's latest "state of the union" or defense address. The refrain is recurrent. The United States needs the cooperation of the weaker non-communist powers if it is to limit the growth of communism towards world dominion without excessive strain on its own institutions; these minor powers need U.S. support--in the form of military, economic, and technical aid, but also in strengthening assurance of political, moral, and military support--to resist the disruptive pressures of their internal forces of discontent and to stand resolute before the external intimidations of the communist world.

It is difficult to find a satisfactory term to describe the sum total of the collective defense arrangements created over the years since 1947. The work "system", often used, has been avoided here because the whole does not comprise a system, although it contains systematic elements. Nor, for that matter, is the "whole" really a whole, for the exigencies of day-to-day foreign policy, particularly as they reflect divergences and often enough even conflicts of interest between the United States and its major allies in all quarters of the world, have made it impossible to fit all our commitments together in a consistent whole. Indeed this has been urged upon us at one time or another by first one then another of our allies. But always it turns out that behind the suggestion lies the hope of reconciling our world-view, at least in all major particulars, with that of the proponent ally, and this has been a forlorn hope because behind the differences of view--with Britain over Formosa, for example--lie real differences of national interest, or at least emotional differences which are currently irreconcilable. There has been, to be sure, an effort to create a system of regional arrangements, each internally consistent and all having in

29

[LC]

common the fact that they serve as links in a containment chain surrounding the communist bloc of nations. The incompatibilities of the hoped-for system are, however, notorious and are made more so by each crisis in the Middle or Far East. The weakness of some of the links in the chain is equally notorious; this has given rise to the observation so often made that the containment policy would actually have been more effective had collective defense not been carried to the extreme (sometimes called "pactomania") of insisting upon regional arrangements in the absence of viable "regions" on which they might be based.

To minimize these semantic difficulties the term "network" has been chosen to describe the result of the U.S. policy of collective defense, even though the term enjoys little sanction in common usage. The thread of containment--i. e., the United States policy of doing all it should, or at least all it can, to prevent the spread of the communist domain--runs through all the arrangements, bilateral and multilateral, legal and doctrinal, that make up the network. There are, of course, other linkages such as the common membership of Britain and France in NATO and SEATO, of Britain and Turkey in NATO and METO, and of Britain and Pakistan in METO and SEATO. But it is not just sound drafting that limits the areas of the regions defined in each treaty--that in one instance excludes Formosa but includes Pakistan and New Zealand in "Southeast Asia", and in another includes Turkey but excludes the remainder of the Middle East from the "North Atlantic area". These oddities of inclusion and exclusion reflect the local conditions under which united action is possible; they reflect equally the limits on common action both within and between "regions".

We are more interested here, however, in what is an element common to all the arrangements in the network, though with variations of weight and style, as we shall see. This common element is the U.S. contribution to local collective defense. Moreover, without intention to disparage the moral, the psychological, and the economic elements of support that combine with the military to make up the political totality of the U.S. contribution, it is the last of these elements, the military, that will be examined in greater detail.

And here the first thing that must be said about the U.S. military contribution to local and collective defense is what it is in essence. It is not military aid and advice, not the sale or gift of arms, not the supply of military training missions or places on the student roster of the Command and General Staff College; it is not even the stationing of U.S. troops, the location of a SAC base on the allied territory, or the Seventh Fleet just over the horizon. The essence is the commitment. It is the extension to an ally of the magic concession that an attack upon his territory is an attack upon ours, or at least that it will be regarded as endangering our peace and security. For this concession spreads over his weakness the mantle of our strength. It sanctions the risks he must take when he combines his fortunes with those of his neighbors and thereby shares their vulnerability. In unity there is strength. But in the unity of resistance to dominion in a world overcast by the duopoly of great power there is also provocation. Without the support of one of the superpowers, a union of minor powers may increase more than it diminishes the danger to security. Hence the non-communist alternative to membership in the U.S. collective defense network is not membership in a "third force" but neutralism, not the creation of another power center, but the abnegation of power.

What, then, does the U.S. Security commitment mean? This is a question to which an answer found in the language of treaties can be most misleading. Is an attack upon Latin America, or upon Western Europe, to be regarded and treated by the people of the United States precisely as though it were an attack upon the continental United States? This would not have been the meaning attached to the formula

30

[LC]

a few years ago. Such an attack would have called for a major national effort, but an effort that could easily have been distinguished from the desperation, say, of the Confederacy's defense of Petersburg and Richmond. It would have meant the promise to employ U.S. armed forces, and an undertaking to mobilize the manpower and industry of the United States if required, as was done in two world wars. It would not have meant literally identifying Rio or Caracas, or Berlin or Paris, with New York or Chicago. Moreover, it would not have meant the abandonment of the exercise of judgment, of the application of a sense of proportion, or the drawing of distinctions regarding the nature of the attack, its cause, and its purpose. All the more totalitarian conceptions of the meaning of the formula--those which require the use of our nuclear military power to overwhelm the aggressor, and to destroy the sources of his military power if that is the only way he can be overwhelmed--we owe not to the words of the treaties, nor to the historical precedents, but to the logic of nuclear deterrence. And it is open to question whether this "logic" is logical now that the prospect of total nuclear war is becoming equally total in both directions. It is easy enough, and in terms of power politics sensible enough, to assume the obligations of a total nuclear guarantee from a position of nuclear monopoly or unassailable predominance. But just as the totality commonly assumed to be implicit in our major collective defense commitments today would hardly have been possible, as a practical matter, for a continental power before the advent of planes and missiles and nuclear weapons, so it becomes illogical when these instruments of destruction are available to both sides.

The issue is not one of "total" versus "limited" war; it is certainly not "peace through deterrence" versus "appeasement". The issue concerns the nature of the collective defense commitment in practical terms. These terms encompass the weight of our national security interest and an estimate of the interests of the opposing side in each separate conflict. They include the nature and limits of the means we have available (or can make available) to uphold our commitment, together with the effort we can reasonably expect our local allies to exert on their own behalf, but also the means available to the prospective aggressor. The terms encompass also the relation of the commitment in question to other commitments for which we may have to reserve some of our resources; they also encompass the impact upon those other commitments--and, indeed, upon the network of collective defense commitments as a whole--of the course of action we pursue when a particular commitment must be honored. All these considerations must be assembled and balanced, one against the other and each against all, before statements are justified such as those so often made: for example, that while we might conceivably respond to local or otherwise limited aggression in the Middle East with such conventional (non-nuclear) forces as we can bring to bear, we cannot possibly pretend to oppose the conventional masses of Red China without using at least "tactical" nuclear weapons--i.e. nuclear weapons of low yield in explosive power, confined to the "battlefield,"--and any kind of war that is not "total" in every respect is unthinkable on the NATO front, or indeed, in any conflict in which the armed forces of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are openly engaged.

All such dogmatic assertions are seductive in their simplicity and in their apparent necessity in terms of the logic of nuclear deterrence. But if, as we have suggested, the logic of nuclear deterrence is obsolete these inferences from it are anachronistic. In the light of the military realities of nuclear parity between the U.S. and the leading communist power, they are no more and no less valid than other dogmatic propositions emotionally inspired by what Sir Winston Churchill named "the balance of terror." There is no alternative to peace." "There will never be another war because any war in the nuclear era will destroy civilization and no statesman would ever deliberately make such a choice." "Because nuclear weapons exist they will be used in any future war." "No nuclear power will ever concede

31

[L.C.]

defeat while the destructive force of nuclear weapons lies unused in its arsenals." "In any war in which the U.S. is engaged we must use whatever force is necessary to win." "No power will deliberately initiate the use of nuclear weapons except in a last-ditch effort to survive, and no winner will dare press an advantage against a nuclear power far enough to compel the latter to initiate the use of nuclear weapons." "War has become so destructive that military power is irrelevant to the relations of states. Henceforth decisions between competing national interests will be made in terms of the political, psychological, and economic components of the conflict." There is truth in some, perhaps in all, such assertions, but far less than sufficient truth to constitute them Holy Writ. There is also untruth in them, and fatalism, and wishful thinking.

Our planning for the era of rocket missiles, intercontinental and trans-
sonic jet bombers, electronic warfare, and "tactical" and thermonuclear warheads,
cannot rest upon certainties; uncertainty is inescapable. At best, knowledge in
the military sciences and arts is a matter of comparative probabilities, and the
probabilities are often quite difficult to estimate. Some future technical and
tactical developments are more probable than others, often a great deal more
probable than the really cataclysmic ones that tease the morbid imagination. Some
military capabilities and some strategies offer higher probability of success than
others; so, likewise, do some adaptations of strategy and tactics to available and
foreseeable weapons. Allowance must always be made for an erroneous estimate of
the probabilities, but it is as unwise to concentrate effort and resources on the
most "dangerous" but less probable contingencies as it is completely to ignore the
less probable, and even the unforeseen.

We are familiar with the charge that the military profession customarily anticipates the next war by perfecting its preparation for the last one. The avalanche of technological developments in the military field, however, has produced another infatuation equally devastating in its consequences. This is the tendency to make military gadgetry an end in itself, which too often takes the form of judging the tools of war only in terms of their maximum destructiveness. So long as the capacity of weapons to kill and to destroy was limited, and the destruction of war came mainly from its disruptive effect upon society—including its tendency to spread lawlessness, famine, and disease—each increase in the destructiveness of weapons was a significant quantum of addition to the equations of force in the relations of peoples. But with the advent of nuclear weapons, and even more so with the advent of thermo-nuclear weapons—if not, indeed, earlier with the advent of long-range aircraft—the destructive force available in the world seems clearly to have become excessive in relation to the human aims that normally have meaning.

The ultimate of war's destructiveness is the occasional extermination of a victim people. Given time and determination, this could be achieved with stones and clubs as well as with "modern" weapons. Short of this, but still "total", is the extirpation of a rival power: *delenda est Cartago*. Either conception of the purpose of war makes a fetish of "security", makes the maximum accumulation of power an end in itself, or substitutes "fury" for reason. But in the historical context in which such purposes have been realized, the risk of self-immolation of the people bent on the annihilation or extirpation of an enemy was low. No doubt this self-destruction did occasionally come to pass, owing to the socially Pyrrhic consequences of disorder, famine, and plague brought on by long-lasting conflict. But in general the outcome of war could be counted on to be an either-or outcome, with the losses on one side significantly outweighing the losses on the other. And, in fact, in historic times the decision to push war to the ultimate of annihilation or extirpation was usually not made until there was a winner with enough energy left to complete the process.

32

[Lc]

The first half of the twentieth century has witnessed a fundamental change in these historic conditions and choices. Now it is highly probable that any people will destroy themselves who in error or fury refrain from imposing limits upon the excessive force of military destruction at their disposal--if they and their enemy both are advanced in the technology of war. This is, to be sure, not a certainty. There are a number of improbable developments that are foreseeable, as well as all the unforeseeable developments, that might, in fact, reduce the present high probability of mutual destruction in such a conflict. But it is an optimist indeed who does not see the trend running in the contrary direction--towards reduction rather than increase in a "winner's" chance of survival.

When the destructiveness of military weapons is low, or in any circumstance in which the means available to honor a military commitment are limited, it is reasonable to think of that commitment in terms of the maximum force that can be mobilized from existing resources and spared from other requirements. But when the destructiveness of the weapons is excessive, in the sense defined, the problem is not to maximize but to measure their employment in support of a commitment. This may well mean a shift of emphasis from destructiveness as such to the nature of the weapons and their suitability to the requirements of the particular case. And this shift may be dictated not only because destruction alone may prove inappropriate, but also because it may prove insufficient in the form available. Destructiveness will prove inappropriate if it cannot be employed with sufficient discrimination so that it is visited only on the enemy and not also on an ally, or on a people whose friendship we desire to win or keep, or if the enemy's response may be counted on to have the same results. Destructiveness will also be inappropriate if used in such a way as to cause us to over-reach the scope of the commitment and thereby expand the conflict, risking, as an ultimate limit, our own destruction. Weapons designed to maximize destructiveness (either in terms of the size of the package, or in terms of cost, or in terms of the number of men necessary to employ these weapons) may also prove unsuitable, inadequate, and therefore insufficient, if the conditions of the conflict preclude their use in a manner which exploits their destructiveness.

For these reasons our widespread collective defense commitments reinforce the need for military forces in sufficient variety and strength--in the various arms and in terms of various types of weapons and methods of employment--to give us a balance of military resources corresponding to the expected needs. The great "un-balancer" of our forces has been the "theory of the deterrent", or "massive retaliation" as it is known familiarly to the world press. Several references have already been made to this theory and to the strategy of nuclear deterrence based upon it. We must now examine it more closely.

Four historical facts are essential to an understanding of the strategy of nuclear deterrence. All relate to the circumstances in which it was evolved, and therefore presumably bear a causal relationship to the strategy itself. First, it should be remembered that the "doctrine" of massive retaliation, which was the first systematic statement of the theory of nuclear deterrence, was formulated in connection with the Indo-China crisis of 1953-1954. In other words, it was a strategy evolved to meet the requirements of collective defense. The second and third facts provide the political background: a new Administration pledged (a) to the proposition that the Korean War had been wrongly and wastefully fought by the preceding Administration; and (b) to a program of defense economy. The fourth historical fact is that the United States military forces were just then entering upon the period in which our nuclear predominance had real meaning.

In the passage from his address of January 12, 1954, a part of which was quoted earlier, Secretary Dulles went on to say:

33

[LC]

...Local defense will always be important. But there is no local defense which alone will contain the mightily landpower of the Communist world. Local defenses must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power. A potential aggressor must know that he cannot always prescribe battle conditions that suit him. Otherwise, for example, a potential aggressor, who is glutted with manpower, might be tempted to attack in places where his superiority was decisive.

The way to deter aggression is for the free community to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with means of its own choosing.

The general theme of the statement was economic. With obvious reference to the way the Korean War had been fought, the Secretary said: "We do not need self-imposed policies that sap our strength."⁸

In later statements, and particularly in an article published in *Foreign Affairs* in April 1954, Secretary Dulles spelled out in detail what he meant by "the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power." This was that the possession of nuclear weapons gave the United States the capacity to "punish" aggression, quickly and economically, not in the sense that the aggressor must be utterly destroyed, but that he would "lose from his aggression more than he could win." In brief, the aggressor must be assumed to have chosen the object of his aggression in the belief that its attainment would be worth the costs and risks of attaining it. We could, however, deprive him of this expectation by convincing him that no matter what the worth of the objective might be to him, we would, by the use of nuclear destructive power, make him pay *more* than it was worth. And if we did convince him, he would be deterred from making the attack.⁹

At this point a fifth historical fact needs to be recalled. This strategy of nuclear deterrence was formulated to meet the expansionist pressures of Communist China, a power that while "glutted with manpower" had *no* nuclear weapons. Moreover, the greater power with which the Chinese People's Republic was allied, though it did have nuclear weapons, was as yet far inferior to the United States in respect to their possession and use.

The major difference between 1954 and 1950, in terms of U.S. military strength --not in terms of U.S. domestic politics--was the following: in 1950 the U.S. possessed only the beginnings of its nuclear force and almost certainly could not have prevented the Red Army from occupying Western Europe had its use of its limited nuclear stocks against the Chinese preceptitated a world war; but by 1954 the growing power of the Strategic Air Command, the mounting stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and the coming stocks of thermonuclear bombs, had given the U.S. the certain capacity to destroy the Soviet Union, as well as Red China, with very little risk of effective reprisal. But it was almost equally certain that this happy state of affairs was not going to last for long. This is why it is difficult to treat with respect the strategy of nuclear deterrence, in the original form. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the thinking it expressed reflected an improvident decision to build the national defense policy upon sand.

Mr. Dulles, whom it is by no means unreasonable to quote because he has best articulated the thinking of all the architects of the national defense policies of this period, later tried to adapt his "theory of the deterrent" to the rising nuclear power of the U.S.S.R. His latest version appeared, again in *Foreign Affairs*, in October 1957, in an article entitled: Challenge and Response in United States Foreign Policy".¹⁰ In this article he explicitly acknowledged the arrival of the U.S.S.R. at maturity as a nuclear power: "Today," he said, "a general war between the great mili-

34

[LC]

tary Powers could destroy almost all human life, certainly in the northern latitudes. Our working hypothesis must be that what is necessary is possible. We assume that the forces which man has created, man can by wisdom, resourcefulness and discipline harness and control." But along the way to this somber diagnosis and this suggestion of a hopeful prescription, he took comfort in the existence of the so-called "small" or "tactical" nuclear weapons. For, without assuming their possession to be an exclusive privilege of the "free world", he concluded that their use could be a tremendous advantage, first: because they would enable the United States and its allies to defeat (and therefore to deter) an attack by the massive conventional armies of the communist bloc; and second: because the Russians would be reluctant to initiate nuclear aggression, the only kind they could rationally initiate, and would consequently be deterred again:

> Thus the tables may be turned, in the sense that instead of those who are non-aggressive having to rely upon all-out nuclear retaliatory power for their protection, would-be aggressors would be unable to count on a successful conventional aggression, but must themselves weigh the consequences of invoking nuclear war.

This argument appears not to have been very convincing to our allies, particularly in NATO, who were much more disturbed by the implication, inherent in Mr. Dulles' interest in "tactical" nuclear weapons, that the United States might be contemplating a nuclear war "limited" to their territories, reserving massive thermonuclear retaliation as the ultimate response only in case of a Russian attack upon North America.

Mr. Dulles' article was followed shortly by the launching of the Russian earth satellites and talk of a "missile gap" which reflected the fear that our strategic retaliation forces might actually become inferior to the Russian. Since then--the fall of 1957--official interest in the problems of local defense and limited war has increased within the U.S. Administration. But even more eloquent proof of the changed climate is the fact that, during the Middle East crisis of 1958, when U.S. marines and airborne troops were landed in Lebanon, and during the Quemoy crisis that erupted a little later, most of the "deterrence" talking was done by the other side.

The change-over, in fact, began earlier. It was during the Suez War in 1956 that the Russians first began uttering threats of nuclear retaliation specifically aimed at the Western Allies, rather than contenting themselves--as they had done for several years--with the observation that it was capitalism, and not communism, that would be destroyed in a nuclear war. The new and more pointed threats presumably reflected their growing confidence in their intermediate range missiles, with which they may believe they could annihilate the population of Western Europe, and, even more to the point, destroy the overseas bases upon which the United States still depends for the bulk of its strategic striking power.

When the Chinese Communists opened artillery fire on Quemoy Island in August 1958, after a tacit cease-fire that had endured for over two years, the United States response was not only minimal *action* (as had also been true in 1955), it was also minimal *declaration* (which had certainly not been true when the Formosa Straits Declaration was being proposed, debated, and passed by Congress in 1955). Indeed, in this renewal of the Far East crisis it was rare for the word "deterrence" even to be used, and nothing was said about nuclear retaliation, "massive" or otherwise, beyond a few fugitive utterances from irritated generals who were promptly cautioned to control their tongues. Instead, it was the Soviet Union that assumed the role of the deterrer, warning "the inspirers and organizers of the new military adventure in the Far East"--in words reminiscent of Mr. Dulles' "in places and with

35

[LC]

means of its own choosing"--not to expect "that the counter-blow will be limited to the offshore islands and the Straits of Formosa. They will receive a devastating blow that will put an end to imperialist aggression in the Far East." It was Nikita Khrushchev who announced--using the terms of the Rio and North Atlantic Treaties--that "an attack on the People's Republic of China--is an attack on the Soviet Union". Moreover, he observed that the ships of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Formosa Straits "are fit, in fact, for nothing but courtesy visits and gun salutes and can serve as targets for the right kinds of rockets."¹²

The wheel of fortune has now come full circle, and the Russians imagine themselves possessed on the prize of nuclear deterrence. But the wheel is a notorious swindle, leading the Russians, in their turn, to improvidence, or at least over-confidence, based upon their latest technological successes. For them now, as for the United States earlier, this may well prove a highly unsatisfactory basis upon which to build national defense and a national security policy. Their verbal exaggerations quite aside, however, the undisputed facts of their arrival at maturity as a nuclear power require that we take a critical look at our policy of collective defense. Up to this point, there has been no examination of the military forces we have, and have had, to support our commitments because it seemed pointless to deal in numbers and in deployments of which the significance depends entirely upon the strategy they are expected to implement before cutting away the underbrush surrounding that strategy.

We are now, it appears, at the heart of the problem. Our policy, still designed to contain communism within its present boundaries, rests upon the belief that we can achieve our purposes with minimum economic strain upon the United States by developing effective local defenses, tying them into regional self-defense arrangements, and committing our power to support these collective forces in the vent of of communist aggression. There is an evident shift from faith in *deterrence*, interpreted as a posture virtually guaranteeing that the other side cannot win, to faith in *defense*, a more modest posture meant to assure the prospective aggressor that we and our allies can put up a respectable fight in support of our interests and anticipating that he will, in fact, be "deterred", at least most of the time, by his estimate of the price of overcoming the expected resistance. At a news conference on U.S. defense planning, November 14, 1958, the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Neil H. McElroy, was reported as saying that there would be further reductions in U.S. forces, pursuant to the standing search for defense economy, and that greater reliance would be placed on strengthened local forces in non-communist areas, "since such forces are better suited than United States forces to meet instantaneously the 'probings' of the Communists." There was no consoling mention of "sea and air forces ... equipped with new and powerful weapons of precision which can utterly destroy military targets without endangering unrelated civilian centers," as Mr. Dulles stated the virtues of nuclear retaliation in 1955. Instead, the Secretary of Defense foresaw "an enhanced role for the Navy to keep the sea lanes free should Marine or Army units need to be moved quickly."¹³

The evolution of United States thinking regarding collective defense has so far been reviewed mainly in theoretical terms. After a brief survey of the network of collective defense commitments, we considered first why collective defense was chosen as an essential element of U.S. national security policy and then asked what the U.S. commitment to the defense of its allies means, specifically when both the prospective aggressor and the primary defender have an abundance of destructive nuclear military power. The nuclear era did not burst upon the world full-grown, however, but came to maturity by stages over somewhat more than a decade, during most of which time the United States enjoyed a substantial lead in nuclear power; we therefore found it necessary to trace the historical evolution of U.S. strategic

36

[LC]

thinking as regards collective defense. This required an examination of the theory of nuclear deterrence, including its origins in response to various technical and political stimuli and the changes to which it has been subject owing to the emergence of the USSR as a nuclear power. It now seems desirable, even at the cost of some repetition, to go back over the same historical course to record in broad outline what happened to U.S. military forces and to U.S. military assistance to its allies, under the impact both of the historical influences that help to account for the evolution of strategic concepts, and of those concepts themselves. "Local defense will always be important," Mr. Dulles has said, "but there is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty landpower of the Communist world." What, then, have we in fact done to stimulate local defense efforts, and what provision have we made for U.S. military forces which might be used to enable the local defenses to contain the Communist world? The examination will conclude with a tentative evaluation of the dual effort, and with some suggestions for the future.

The hasty demobilization of 1945 and 1946 left United States armed services in a situation that can fairly be described as a shambles, from which they were only slowly recovering when they were catapulted into a new emergency rearment effort by the Korean War. The armed forces, which numbered over 12 million men on V-E Day in 1945, had dropped to less than 1.4 million by the spring of 1948. The Air Force, first given separate existence by the National Security Act of 1947, had at the time only 38 combat groups of planes. The Army's first post-war personnel ceiling was 670,000, but by 1948 actual strength had fallen to 541,000 because of the inadequacy of volunteer enlistments. The Navy fared better than the other services, but its strength by early 1948 was under 500,000, including the Marines. The defense budget submitted in 1947 for the fiscal year 1948-1949 called for $11,256,000 for all services. Meanwhile, it was becoming evident that the Russian armed forces had been subjected to no such reduction. On the contrary, they retained a total strength of approximately 4 millions, including ground forces in excess of 175 divisions, of which 20-30 divisions were located in East Germany and the satellite areas.

The security considerations that prompted the formulation of the policy of containment during the period 1946-1949 also inspired a re-examination of the United States' own defenses. The first post-war increases were proposed by President Truman in March 1947, when he called for the passage of universal military training (and a temporary extension of the wartime draft to fill the gap until UMT could become effective), and a $3 billion addition to the defense budget. At the same time he recommended an Air Force of 55 groups, together with minimum strengths for all the services. Congress that year extended the draft but postponed consideration of UMT, raised the service minima above the levels recommended by the Department of Defense, and voted the budget of $14 billion. Also, listening to the Air Force, which had appealed over the heads of the Administration, Congress authorized 70 groups. These increases enabled Secretary of Defense James Forrestal to plan 25 Army divisions, a Navy of two fleets with 562,000 men, and the 70-group Air Force. The above was the program in existence, with minor variations, down to June 1950. Meantime, economic aid to Europe had begun in 1948 and the first appropriation of $1.3 billions, for European "mutual defense assistance" was voted in September 1949.

The Korean War affected all these programs, immediately raising the defense appropriations for 1950-1951 from $15.5 to $28.1 billion, with plans to double the armed forces -- to over 3 millions--by mid-1951, and increasing Mutual Defense Assistance from the $1.2 billion planned to over $5.2 billion. The trend continued upward, and was expected to reach a peak in the fiscal year July 1, 1952-June 30, 1953, at $51.2 billion for defense and $10.5 billion for foreign aid, leveling off somewhat lower in later years. In fact, Congress voted $7.3 billion for foreign aid --called "mutual security" for the first time--in the fiscal year beginning July 1,

37

[LC]

1952. Meanwhile, the Truman Administration's defense program for 1952-1953, which was expected to determine the level of post-Korean War armaments--not to create "an active force adequate to carry on a full-scale war" but to put "ourselves in a position to mobilize rapidly if we have to,"--reflected the decline in military activity in Korea.¹⁴ Nevertheless, it called for total military strength of 3.5 millions, with an Army of 21 ready divisions, an Air Force of 143 wings, a Navy of 408 major combatant vessels in active fleets (with 16 carrier groups), and a Marine Corps of 3 divisions.

This was the defense program at which the Eisenhower Administration took its "new look" during 1953 and 1954. This was of course also the period when collective defense came to the fore as a major security policy, and "massive retaliation" or nuclear deterrence emerged as the basic national strategy. Congress had already cut Mr. Truman's proposed budget for the fiscal year 1953-1954 from $51.2 to $46.6 billion, and had reduced his Mutual Defense Assistance proposals by nearly 25% (from $7.9 billion to a little over $6 billion). On April 3, 1953, President Eisenhower announced a further reduction of $8.5 billion in the defense budget. He later made other reductions, and Congress eventually voted $34.4 billion for defense (and somewhat under $4.8 for mutual security). In the later Truman defense budgets the share going to the Air Force had increased greatly, owing to the tremendous expansion program for SAC and the increasing cost of planes. President Eisenhower's first cuts were in aircraft construction, resulting in a revision of plans from the scheduled 143 wings down to 120. Reductions in the other services were to come later; the Army was perhaps most substantially affected, as major combat forces fell during the five-year period 1953---1958 from 21 to 15 divisions. During 1958 and the first half of 1959 a further cut was to reduce the Army to 870,000 men and 14 divisions. By June 1959 the over-all strength of the services was scheduled to decline to 2,525,000, with a defense budget of about $40 billion, however, which reflected the rising cost of military equipment. Meanwhile, mutual security appropriations likewise declined, to $2.8 billion for 1954 and to $2.7 billion for 1955 and 1956, but rose for the fiscal year 1957 to $3.7 billion, which was to be representative of the new level during the next several years.

Paralleling the reductions in the strength of U.S. ground forces, the new Administration instituted a policy of disengaging our ground forces from their forward positions in the Pacific, beginning in December 1953, six months after the Korean Armistice, when President Eisenhower announced that two of the seven Army divisions then in Korea would be withdrawn to the United States. By 1958 there remained only 4 divisions in the Pacific (two Army divisions in Korea, one in reserve in Hawaii, and a Marine division in Okinawa). Meantime, U.S. ground forces in Europe, though they never reached the total of six divisions promised to NATO in 1950, have remained at the 5-division level since 1952.

As the record shows, the Truman Administration was able to do very little about the force requirements of collective defense, beyond extending military aid to Western Europe and increasing our troops in West Germany, until the Korean War. The record also suggests, however, that prior to 1953 there was little systematic thinking regarding the U.S. armed forces required by a widespread collective defense network. The Korean War itself, though fought by the United States within the collective security system of the United Nations, was also an expression of the policy of collective defense. For this reason, and also because it was the only experience the United States had had serving as a planning guide, the Korean War might have been expected to exert a profound influence upon thinking about the military needs of the collective defense network. And indeed it did, but after January 20, 1953 that experience became more an example to be avoided rather than one from which constructive lessons of profound importance were to be learned.

38

[LC]

The Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General Maxwell D. Taylor, has said on several occasions that South Korea was the one place along the vast Asian crescent of the Communist bloc where the United States, in 1950, had even a chance of effectively opposing military aggression, because of the presence of U.S. forces on occupation duty in Japan; the presence of U.S. military advisory teams with the South Korean forces; and the existence of supply lines, bases, and airfields in and around Japan and Korea. By 1953 it was at least possible to believe that U.S. military capability was no longer so limited. The growth of our airpower and of our naval air arm, and their armament with nuclear weapons could be said--and were said--to have changed the circumstances most desirably. Mr. Dulles, then, could embark upon his moves to perfect the network of collective defense commitments while assuring the American people that neither we nor our allies need be prepared to face "the mighty landpower of the Communist world" on the ground again, as we did in Korea. Rather, as he said in March 1955 with reference to SEATO:

> For military defense we shall rely largely upon mobile allied power which can strike an aggressor wherever the occasion may demand. That capacity will, we believe, deter aggression. We shall not need to build up large static forces at all points and the U.S. contribution will be primarily in terms of sea and air power.¹⁵

Whether this policy stood the test of time successfully is the subject of debate. We are told that in the spring of 1954, when the United States was trying desperately to keep the French in the fight against the communist-supported Viet Minh rebels in North Vietnam, a proposal was made within the Administration to use mobile air power in a nuclear strike against the rebels, only to be turned down by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the ground that it would be ineffective.¹⁶

Mr. Dulles himself, according to the interview which appeared in *Life Magazine* in January 1956, eventually recommended that the United States should join in a *ground* offensive against the Viet Minh "just as the U.N. stepped in against the North Korean aggression in 1950," using our nuclear airpower to destroy "staging bases in south China" in retaliation if the Chinese Communists then intervened openly on the Viet Minh side.¹⁷ This proposal was not accepted by our British allies, but the fact that it was made (and Mr. Dulles has never denied it) seems to indicate a fallacy in the comforting assurance that "We do not need self-imposed policies requiring us to use ground forces in support of our collective defense commitments that will sap our strength." It must be added, however, that the Secretary of State claims success for his nuclear deterrence from the fact that the Chinese Communists never did intervene openly in North Vietnam as they did in Korea (but neither did the U.S.), despite massive U. S. assistance to the French. It is presumably because of this conviction that he could subsequently make the statement quoted earlier--and other similar statements--regarding the meaning of the U.S. contribution to the collective defense of the signatories of the Manila Treaty of September 1954. Against the claim, and the conviction, stands the fact that the French were defeated in North Vietnam and another satellite was added to the Communist bloc.

It should be noted that this test of the strategy of nuclear deterrence occurred at a time when the United States unquestionably had a decisive advantage in nuclear weapons and airpower. Four years later, as we have already seen, when there was once again a crisis in the Far East--this time resulting from Chinese Communist aggressive action against the Chinese Nationalists on Quemoy Island--nothing was said on the United States side about nuclear deterrence, presumably because the United States nuclear advantage was open to serious question. By then, in other words, we were facing the future, with defense commitments to scores of nations, covering substantial parts of two hemispheres and six continents; with

39

[LC]

forces in steady process of reduction from the levels reached in the Korean re-
armament; and with little faith remaining in the magic of nuclear deterrence. An
abiding hope that the risks of military action in the nuclear era might in them-
selves "deter" the Communists from military aggression--particularly as their
political, economic, and propaganda offensives have not lacked success--could lead
to the conclusion that there is really little we can do or need to do to put usable
muscle into our guarantees. But if that hope proves false, as have other sanguine
predictions regarding developments behind the Iron Curtain that might favor the
West, we must assuredly anticipate the day when our lack of prevision will be dis-
closed, with unfortunate consequences for our standing in the world. We cannot play
the role of a super-power if our military power does not exist in forms in which we
can and will use it.

It may be inferred from the statement of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, quoted
above, that the diminishing utility of the nuclear deterrent together with mounting
defense costs means that "greater reliance" will be placed upon "strengthened
local forces in the non-communist areas." It is impossible to review the Mutual
Defense Assistance program in detail, but it is said that from 1950 to 1957 nearly
$20 billion in military aid has been extended to our allies; over half of this,
however, went to the NATO Area. During this period the U.S. Army was helping to
train over 200 divisions of allied ground forces--the element of military strength
our allies were, on the whole, best able to support. Aside from the NATO forces in
Western Europe, where U.S. organization and training assistance was perhaps less
substantial than material and foreign exchange support, the bulk of this effort has
been concentrated in five countries. South Korea, with an army of perhaps 600,000,
now actually possessed the second largest army in the non-communist world. Turkey's
army, with about 400,000 men, is the fourth largest. The other three are Greece,
which was the first country to benefit from U.S. military aid; the Republic of China
on the island of Formosa; and the latest beneficiary, the Republic of South Vietnam.
These five countries are in the front lines of the non-communist world, and U.S.
policy has made them into citadels of containment. In the case of three of them--
South Korea, Formosa, and South Vietnam--the military forces with which they have
been provided cannot possibly be supported by the domestic economies. Consequently,
these three are more than beneficiaries of U.S. aid backed by the U.S. security
guarantee; they are de facto dependencies of the U.S.

The military aid record looks impressive, and one may be inclined to wonder what
more can be done "to strengthen local forces" than is already being done. It is
claimed that the nearly $20 billion of U.S. aid, 1950-1957, has been "matched by
allied expenditures of about $122 billion", resulting in allied strength in 1958 of
"almost 5,000,000 ground troops, 2,500 combat vessels and 32,000 planes." (The
1950 figures for comparison are given respectively as 3.6 million, 1,200, and 2,500.)
In addition to this numerical increase there has been of course been a substantial
improvement in quality, both of men and of equipment; for example, allied jet air-
craft have increased from under 600 in 1950 to about 14,000 in 1957.¹⁸

The record is less impressive in detail than a general view suggests. In a
number of instances military aid has been extended for "political" reasons. Little
related to collective defense. Moreover the supposedly political justification in
these cases sometimes raises questions regarding the political wisdom displayed. A
particularly striking example of this is the delivery of a handful of jet fighters
to Saudi Arabia, presumably in order to feed the vanity of the ruling monarch and
make him less likely to press the question of our continued use of the Dhahran air-
base in that country. Similarly open to question is the extension of military aid
to the military clique in control of Thailand. But the most disputable military aid
program of all is probably that to Pakistan, for, despite the high quality of the

40

[Lc]

Pakistani armed forces, it may honestly be doubted that by supporting them we have added as much to the firmness of the non-communist world as we have subtracted by offending and distracting India. A similar and in fact related question, although it involves far more complex political considerations, concerns our support of the Baghdad Pact, in order to close the Middle East "gap" in the "free world perimeter".

Even at its best the military aid program gives rise to justified concern. There is a tendency, understandable in the circumstances, for U.S. military aid missions to endeavor to create local forces in the image of U.S. forces. In part this results from the fact that these forces are supplied with surplus U.S. equipment, and with equipment from current production designed to meet U.S. standards when the surplus is exhausted. But the result might be the same even without the influence of this complex equipment, simply because of the standards of military organization, equipment, training, and operations with which the U.S. military aid teams are indoctrinated--standards evolved to match the productive capacity of an advanced industrial society. Even when a conscious effort is made to overcome these influences the habit of the mass rules against the imagination of the few. The general consequence is to saddle even the "best" of our allies with a military apparatus that is exorbitantly expensive and perhaps no better suited to the terrain and personnel resources of the recipient country than to its economic capacity.

These strictures, of course, do not apply to military aid to the advanced countries of Western Europe. Even within the NATO area, however, they are not entirely inapplicable to Turkey. It is mainly the military dependencies of Asia, however, that give cause for concern. If the communists were really as clever as they are often given credit for being, they would relieve the external pressure on South Korea, South Vietnam, and Formosa and devote their energies to boring from within, castigating the Rhee, Diem, and Chiang governments as "tools" of the United States. The charge would be a most difficult one to meet. For if any one of these governments tried to reduce its dependence upon the United States it would shortly find itself in difficulties with its own military, upon whom it is dependent for its very existence. On the other hand, if it simply resisted the charge, without the saving justification of external military pressure, it would risk uniting all dissident elements within the country under the banner of anti-imperialist nationalism. So long as the external military pressure remains there is probably little that the U.S. can do or needs to do except pay the bills. But forward planning against the time when the communists might change their tactics would be wise. It is difficult without access to all the facts to know what form that planning might take, but a less costly military establishment, combining a smaller standing army with some kind of militia adapted to local terrain and social institutions might prove to be an acceptable solution. The standing army would need to be large enough to sustain the authority of the central government. If the stigma of foreign support and domination were removed it might also serve, if given responsibility for supplying and training the local militia, as an integrating force within the country.

Throughout the underdeveloped world, the military elements of society occupy a key position. It does not, of course, really differ in this respect from the rest of the world, except that the institutions which establish civilian control of the military in more advanced countries are weak in these African and Asian countries lately arrived at independence. In any country a deep internal crisis will bring the military to the forefront, as happened in 1958 in France. But in a country such as Pakistan, or the Sudan, it takes rather less to create such a crisis. Military aid, consequently, has an obvious *mission--exemplaire* if not *civilisatrice*. By giving the officer groups with which it deals not only professional competence, but in addition a sense of pride in a national society built as far as possible on the Western model, the military aid missions can, and do, add substantially to the domestic solidity of these new countries. The case of Indonesia, despite the

41

[LC]

political unrest there during recent years, may well be an outstanding example of what the U.S. military can do largely by advice and example, with limited formal aid and no collective defense agreement, to strengthen the forces of anti-communism.

In addition, in underdeveloped countries, the army may well constitute the major national assault on the problem of illiteracy, while its enlisted members, when they have completed their period of training, may add substantially to that small portion of the country's labor force qualified to acquire modern skills.

Our brief look at the military aid programs justifies no final conclusions regarding their strengths and weaknesses, but does suggest that a purely quantitative measure of their effectiveness would give a quite false impression. It may be difficult to imagine, for example, the kind of war in which the 200 divisions our Army is training overseas would all be employed simultaneously. It would be misleading, certainly, to think of them as freely available for employment at the point of need in a particular local collective defense effort. As the network of defense commitments has not been tied into a system, we could not expect to move forces between the various treaty areas. But it is also quite unlikely that there could be much movement within the separate areas. The element of military flexibility, so essential to counter the advantage the communist world enjoys by virtue of its interior lines of communication, must be supplied by the United States, with some assistance in the appropriate cases from Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, and perhaps the Philippines. The local defense picture is not, of course, all black because of this rigidity. The increased numbers and improved quality of local defense forces do impose greater requirements upon an ambitious aggressor, and consequently do increase the deterrent effect of the collective defense network as a whole, and this may be counted a net gain wherever the accretion of strength is not offset by local or intra-area weakness created by the same programs.

We have seen that the experience of 1953-1955 in the Indo-Chinese and Formosan crises, plus the experience of 1958 in the Middle and Far East, has undermined the concept--evolved in the moment of our nuclear ascendancy, 1953-1954--that the United States can add the essential element of flexibility to collective defense simply by means of its nuclear airpower. Evidence that the lesson has been read correctly in the Department of Defense may be seen in the nature of the responsibilities assigned to the XVIIIth Airborne Corps by the Department of the Army and to the XIXth Air Force by the Department of the Air Force. The former has been constituted the headquarters, Strategic Army Corps (STRAC), and has been charged with seeing that the four divisions of the Army strategic reserve (probably to be reduced to three by the summer of 1959) are trained and ready for prompt movement, by air and sea, to any point of urgent need. The latter has been given the mission of creating tactical task forces specially tailored to meet the needs of particular crises, by bringing together existing Air Force components. One such force was dispatched to Turkey during the Lebanese crisis in the summer of 1958; another was sent to Formosa later in the same year. The Navy, which for many years has employed the task force concept, is at least as well equipped as either the Army or the Air Force to make use of existing resources to go to the support of our allies at the point of attack. Also its attack carrier groups, provided they are not equipped exclusively for "strategic" conflict, and its Marine landing forces are particularly suitable for such employment.

In terms of the theoretical "total" versus "limited" war debate of the last few years, these are the provisions the services have made for "limited" war. In practical terms, they suggest what the armed services can do organizationally to meet the requirements of each particular crisis as it arises. The United States can land a battalion (or less) of Marines--as well as hundreds of thermonuclear bombs.

42

[LC]

The very existence of this range of capabilities, as evidence of what we are prepared to do, and the employment that has been made of some elements of the range, as evidence of our willingness in fact to translate our preparedness into action, may be expected to discourage military adventures by the communists. The military capabilities represented at the lower end of the range are, however, quite restricted, and seem grossly out of balance with those capabilities for destructive nuclear war that we have developed with our eyes on the Soviet menace to North America--and to Western Europe.

Despite natural reluctance to create another higher command, it seems desirable that the provisions for tactical task forces that have been made by the separate Service Departments should be rounded out by the creation of a joint (inter-service) command for tactical operations. Such a command would ensure the necessary inter-service planning in the detail required for prompt employment, particularly of larger task forces that require a combination of air and sea lift. More important, perhaps, it would establish a more effective claimant for the personnel and equipment needs of this type of employment when funds are being allocated. The argument is easily made that the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the three Service Departments are all seized of this problem. But, in defense as elsewhere, what's everybody's business tends to be nobody's. No one wages against the continued existence of the Strategic Air Command that all elements of the Defense Department are concerned with "the deterrent:; nor against the North American Air Defense Command that all are concerned with the defense of the North American continent. If the international scene, and particularly U.S. collective defense commitments, create military requirements that are *sui generis*--a proposition for which a very good case can be made--then it seems appropriate to provide a special joint planning command, reporting directly to the Joint Chiefs, as SAC and NORAD do, to ensure the best possible effort to meet these requirements.

The creation of such a headquarters would not, of course, automatically remove the limits on our tactical forces, which are in large part limits of resources: men, equipment, and transport. We can move a small body of men by air very quickly almost anywhere. During the Lebanese crisis we moved roughly a battalion a day by a combined sea and air lift, until there were 17,000 U.S. fighting men in Lebanon. But this move was made after considerable advance notice and without opposition; it was more important as evidence of the risk we were willing to take than as proof of the military power we could exert in actual hostilities. Against active opposition --for example, to counter an actual attack on the frontiers of one of our allies-- our so-called "limited war" forces are actually so limited that we run great risk of confrontation with the difficult alternatives of falling back on nuclear retaliation or admitting our incapacity for effective action. And while we are in this situation, we must expect that the "threat", when it comes, is very likely to be one for which our nuclear force is either an insufficient or an excessive response, as appears to have been the case in Indo-China in 1954.

There are two possible solutions to this shortfall of available tactical force. One is to create additional strength; the other is to make better use of the strength we have. Let us first consider how we could better employ the force we have--in addition, that is, to the organizational arrangements already made by the Services and to the joint command suggested above.

One possible method of improvement might be to proceed further with the dis-engagement of U.S. forces from fixed overseas commitments, which began when the Eisenhower Administration reduced our ground troops in Korea from eight divisions to two. Both engaged and disengaged forces serve a "deterrent" purpose. So long as nuclear retaliation was our basic national strategy, there was probably a

43

[LC]

general deterrent advantage in having our forces engaged at certain critical points. We were drawing lines all over the world which we told the other side it must not cross, and placing a few Americans on those lines to be killed no doubt helped to prove we meant what we said. Also the strength of our allies was at a low ebb, so that concrete evidence of our commitment to their defense was in some cases essential. In addition, our ability to move our forces promptly was quite limited, so that it was well to have some of them where they might be needed--in case we found we could not rely completely upon nuclear retaliation. The new strategic situation, with n nuclear power on the other side comparable to our own, and the evidence already noted that the United States is no longer even pretending that the threat of nuclear retaliation is our sole or even primary "deterrent", suggest that we may soon no longer be able to afford to engage so substantial a portion of our forces unless we can afford substantially greater forces. Disengaged central reserves, provided they can be moved promptly enough to the point of need, constitute the most effective deployment for forces as limited as ours now are relative to their possible employments.

The realization of this possibility, of course, depends upon whether the change can be reconciled with our commitments to Korea and to NATO. Certainly it could not take place in a hurry, nor should the possibility even be raised until the time is right politically. In Korea, in fact, little can be done in the way of further disengagement, unless it should be decided that no U.S. troops are required in Korea at all. The two understrength divisions there now are probably the minimum required so long as a token engagement is considered necessary. But maximizing the flexibility of our tactical forces is not incompatible with maintaining token engagements--which, in fact, it might well be to our advantage to have elsewhere in the collective defense network. By the same token, however, the principle that the bulk of local defenses must be supplied locally should apply in Western Europe as elsewhere.²⁰

The pressing and difficult problems of NATO's defenses cannot be examined in detail here. This much, however, can be said; there appears to be no solution that does not require a greater defense effort on the part of our European partners, and along with it greater reliance on their own resources.¹⁹ Moreover, what has been said above about the nature of the U.S. collective defense commitment applies in principle to NATO as well as to SEATO.

It is true that Western Europe's defense is more vital to our security than that of Southeast Asia. But something is gravely amiss if the five divisions we keep in Europe excuse our European allies from making an adequate defense effort because they believe their security is guaranteed by our determination to administer thermonuclear retaliation against the Russians if our troops are attacked. And if they do not believe this, then the number of American troops at present assigned to the NATO forces ought not to be required to indicate what we *will* do in the event of an attack. We are, it is to be hoped, determined to defend Western Europe, and we would probably expend our military efforts to the limit to prevent its conquest and incorporation in the communist world, even though we had little hope of surviving the debacle ourselves. But conquest is by no means the only threat against which the nations of Western Europe require defense.

It is difficult to believe that the logic of nuclear deterrence, which has been so widely discredited elsewhere in the world where the destructive effects of nuclear retaliation might well be confined to the immediate area of conflict, applies without qualification to the defense of Western Europe, where nuclear retaliation at the least means exposing our allies and the friendly peoples of the satellite countries to risk of annihilation, and only a little beyond that the thermonuclear involvement of the North American continent. It would be absurd for

44

[LC]

us, and for our allies, to assume the worst about any communist "aggression" against Western Europe before exploring every other possibility, because the decision we may have to make once we assume the worst may be, if we chose to retaliate "massively", the last decision the United States of America will ever make, or, alternatively, may result in an uncalled-for surrender. Indeed, the tragedy of the present situation in Western Europe is that the weakness of existing troops means that we are as gravely threatened by the possibility that we may needlessly be faced with that ultimate decision as we are by the consequences of an attack.

Again it is flexibility that is required. NATO needs forces that will discourage aggressive action, but these "deterrent" forces must be adaptable to the full range of crisis situations that may arise when deterrence fails--as it may through accident or through the agency of some third party (e.g. East German rebels) as well as by communist "miscalculation" of NATO strength and intentions. The theory of nuclear deterrence required threats of maximum action ("maximum" enough to "punish"). When both sides possess unlimited resources for nuclear destruction ("unlimited" because the upper limits lie somewhere beyond the utter destruction and annihilation of the enemy), the ultimate consequences of any single military decision are more significant than the immediate consequences. The most elementary requirement, then, is the need for time to judge the danger and to adjust the response. And the one fatal mistake is to make decisions that foreclose later decisions.

The Western European defense requirement is for forces of all kinds, armed with conventional and with nuclear weapons, which can be fed into a crisis situation in whatever strength is required. There is now no lack of NATO force to "contain" (if that is the word for it) an all-out nuclear attack, assuming that such an attack would invoke a U.S. strategic counter-stroke. There is also no lack of NATO force to compel the Russians to make a nuclear attack rather than a purely conventional one. But if the Russians do not desire to make a nuclear attack, it is also difficult to believe that it is in Western Europe's interest to compel them to do so. Yet the mere capability of compelling the Russians to use nuclear weapons may not be a very effective deterrent, despite Mr. Dulles' hopes, particularly if we consider the chance that accidents and third parties might intervene. What NATO notably lacks is a sufficiency of force at the lower end of the spectrum of military destruction to deal with crisis situations that can be contained with conventional weapons.

The additional NATO strength in conventional forces must come from the European NATO countries themselves. Even so, it may seem paradoxical to be considering, at the same time, the possibility of withdrawing some of the U.S. forces committed to NATO. Two indisputable facts can be advanced in defense of this possibility: first, the changed circumstances in Western Europe since NATO was first conceived and set up, and second, the vastly increased U.S. collective defense commitments elsewhere. Our European NATO partners are no longer in the state of weakness and instability that endangered their security when we went to their assistance in 1949. On the contrary, their economic recovery has been accomplished, and their governments are strong. In addition, substantial progress has been made towards the closer integration of their economies, and, at least for some of them, there seems a real hope of eventual political union. It is not at all unreasonable that they should assume larger responsibility for their own defense, particularly in view of the fact that they alone can supply what, at the moment, is most needed.

This does not mean that the U.S. should sever its relations with NATO, nor anything like it. In fact, in keeping with the practice we have followed to date of combing both the engagement and the disengagement of our forces in an effort to find

45

[LC]

the most "deterrent" combination, it is certainly desirable that we should keep some of our troops with NATO forces. But it ought not to be necessary to keep more than a third or more of our Army combat units tied down in Western Europe. A smaller force, of say one or two divisions, ought to suffice to prove our commitment to NATO defense. In addition, once we had properly organized our strategic reserves, it would be desirable to run periodoc exercises, involving the actual movement of parts of this reserve to possible points of need, including Western Europe. These exercises would be invaluable as training--if we are indeed to depend upon the prompt re-inforcement of our allies for the integrity of our collective defense commitments-- and also as proof to the world of what we could do. They would be expensive, but the expense would be justified if the exercises reduced the total requirement for forces, or if they increased the effectiveness of the forces we had. Moreover, the expense would be reduced if the exercises did not in all cases originate in the U.S., which suggests the desirability of strengthening the area reserves we now maintain in the Pacific (one under-strength Marine division on Okinawa and one Army division in Hawaii).

Increasing our disengaged reserves, even at the cost of reducing the forces we have assigned to NATO, and possibly spreading our token engaged forces to a few other exposed fronts--these are possible ways of making better use of the forces we have left after five years of steady reductions. They are not meant to suggest, however, that the overall strength of U.S. defense forces is adequate. No final solution to the problem of manpower economy can be given here. Indeed it is doubtful if a perfect solution is ever possible. There must always be a choice of evils. It does seem an odd choice, however, when all other indications point to growing recognition of the shortcomings of nuclear deterrence, that we should be continuing to dismantle the forces we acquired in the Korean War rearmament. Citation of the disengagement of our ground forces from the Pacific to indicate one thing that might be done in the future was not meant to suggest that a partial European disengagement should be carried out for the same purpose that animated the Pacific disengagement. For while our Army divisions in Korea were being decreased from seven to two, our total strength in divisions was decreased from nineteen to fourteen. Consequently, the five divisions were disengaged only to be dissipated. The last two Army Chiefs of Staff, with all the facts before them, have protested the sacrifice of Army strength to pay the costs of the strategic deterrent, and appealed for a force of twenty divisions as the minimum required to discharge their many responsibilities.

In any realistic discussion of the forces required to honor our commitments to collective defense, the Army inevitably assumes the center of the stage. This is for the simple reason that if we are to support the development of local defense forces, and if we are to counter local attacks locally, we must do it on the ground --as Mr. Dulles proposed in 1954. It is no accident that the Army has had major responsibility for the administration of our foreign military aid programs. But the Army also has a vast number of other responsibilities not directly contributory to strength in reserves for tactical employment around the world. If the Army is to fulfill its responsibilities in connection with collective defense more adequately then is possible with a reserve of three or four half-ready divisions, it must have more men and more funds. We saw during the Lebanese affair that both the Marines add the Army were using equipment obsolescent by the standards of that supplied by the Russians to the Syrian armed forces. We should certainly continue to try to get a larger combat force out of the Army's present personnel authorization, though this is a solution that occurs to everyone who first looks at the problem of ground strength and the possibilities have been rather thoroughly worked over by now. But whatever personnel base we start with, there seems to be no escaping higher costs per man, for new and better equipment and for more and better transport.

46

[LC]

We should also be considering the advantages of overseas supply bases in areas where we do not now have them, such as in the Middle East and on or off the shores of South and Southeast Asia. These bases could be pre-stocked with the supplies we expect our ground and tactical air forces to require if we have to employ them in those areas. These supply bases could greatly simplify the problem of moving our forces rapidly into position, because the movement of personnel is vastly easier than the movement of their equipment. Also we should be considering the prospects of improving our ability to move troops by air by acquiring and developing the air-bases required for long-range movement in "strategic" transports. And finally, we should be taking a long look at the various means of transport. These include both the long-range air transports and the shorter-range "tactical" transports that may be needed to relay our forces from the forward strategic air bases to the battle areas. They include also special-purpose ships of various kinds, including the "roll-on, roll-off" type that can land a unit in a condition to go directly into battle. Of these latter the Military Transport Service now has one, already considered obsolete.

All these suggestions for more adequate provision for the flexible forces needed to support our collective defense commitments raise the question of funds. It may be true, as some have argued, that the mounting cost of military hardware is such that we have no choice but to rely ever more heavily on nuclear weapons simply because they pack "more bang for a buck". The same argument, of course, suggests that we should concentrate more and more on the bigger bangs, because they are more economical than the smaller ones. But, considering the price we shall pay in other ways, we surely do not want to yield to this argument until all other possibilities have been explored. It may be futile to suggest here, in view of the alarms and confusions current in that area of defense, that one possibility which deserves more exploration than it has received to date is that some measure of "sufficiency" may be found for our strategic military forces, so that the tactical forces will not always have to survive on the leavings from the budget table. There is also, of course, the possibility that the capacity of our economy to support national defense has been underrated and that the relation between the general productivity of our economy and the level of our defense expenditures has been misunderstood.

What is important to keep in mind while these possibilities and many others are being explored, is what it is we can buy with additional funds if they can be found, and what we shall pay for not finding them. It may well be that the real measure of what constitutes a great power in the nuclear age is the ability to dispose of *usable* military force--which is after all only another way of saying that it is a measure of the ability to retain great power. A tremendous national effort is required to pass the threshold of nuclear maturity. Two powers have made the journey, a third is on the way, and doubtless others will follow--failing those international controls on nuclear weapons that all claim to desire but none will agree to. But as nations achieve this high estate--two now, more later--significant distinctions between them in terms of the *total* military effort they can make, the amount of destruction they can accomplish, the number of lives they can snuff out, seem to fall away, leaving all equal in this ultimate sense of power. Yet, as the troubled record of our time forcefully demonstrates, national power does not for this reason lose its utility. Nor do the non-military components of national power (if there are any such that cannot be traced ultimately to military roots) completely displace the military. On the contrary, in a world in which all governments and all peoples proclaim themselves lovers of peace, military action, actual and anticipated, supplies the headlines of the world's press. And we, who surely are not least in our devotion to peace, find ourselves compelled to deploy our forces, to use our military strength, more frequently--or at least more openly--than the other side in the great competition between "ways of life" in which we are engaged.

47

[LC]

What we can buy, then, and what we will buy if our thinking is straight, is military power we can use, not just for threats that may be idle or fatal depending upon the import of the issues over which they are made, but power to be employed in proportion to the import of the conflict. Only in this way can we also buy that precious commodity, freedom to choose. For it is freedom of choice among the available actions that we sacrifice when we pre-commit ourselves to military decisions. In this analysis the freedom to choose conventional means of defense has been emphasized, in part because it is that freedom that has been most endangered by our defense policies of the past few years, but in part also because it is really difficult to foresee the circumstances in which our determined ability to employ military force in support of our interests cannot be amply demonstrated without the excess destructiveness of nuclear weapons. Nor is the argument very convincing which is so fervently advanced by some writers, namely that the atomic nucleus is inherently pro-U.S., pro-West, or pro-Free World. But nothing in this examination is meant to suggest that the non-communist world does not require "tactical" nuclear weapons in its arsenals, to limit the communist option to employ them and to respond appropriately if the other side chooses nuclear war. Nor is there the least intention to suggest that a major continuing effort to maintain our strategic nuclear power can be avoided. The "balance of terror" is anything but static. We may indeed perish if we do not find ways to maintain it. But we may perish anyway, though possibly more slowly, if we continue to allow the effort to maintain the strategic balance so to preoccupy and exhaust us that we lack the time, the energy, and the resources to safeguard the priceless freedom to choose.

48

## FOOTNOTES

1. For an excellent discussion of the origins of the Truman Doctrine see Joseph M. Jones, *The Fifteen Weeks, New York (Viking) 1955*. The text of President Truman's address to a joint session of Congress on aid to Greece and Turkey is given in an appendix, pp. 269-274, also Department of State *Bulletin*, Vol. SVI, No. 403 (March 23, 1947) pp. 534-537.

2. Harry S. Truman, *Memoirs*, Vol. II, *Years of Trial and Hope*, p.241.

3. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, quoted in *The New York Times*, January 31, 1958.

4. Joint resolution of Congress, signed by President Eisenhower March 9, 1957. For complete text see Department of State *Bulletin*, Vol. XXXVI, No. 926 (March 25, 1957) p. 481.

5. "Senators Not Forewarned of U. S. Baghdad Pact Role" by E. W. Kenworthy, *The New York Times*, July 30, 1958. Also *The London Times*, July 29, 1958.

6. *The New York Times*, October 28, 1956.

7. In a symposium being prepared by The Center for publication by The Johns Hopkins Press Mr. Wolfers will speak of an "alignment system".

8. "The Evolution of Foreign Policy", address before the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc., New York, January 12, 1954. For complete text see Department of State *Bulletin*, Vol. XXX, No. 761 (January 25, 1954) pp. 107-110.

9. "Policy for Security and Peace" by John Foster Dulles, *Foreign Affairs*, Vol. 32, No. 3 (April 1954) pp. 353-364.

10. *Foreign Affairs*, Vol. 36, No. 1 (October 1957) pp. 25-43.

11. *The Washington Post*, September 5, 1958, quoting from *Pravda* of the same date.

12. Khruschchev to Eisenhower letter of September 7, 1958, published in *The New York Times*, September 9, 1958.

13. Jack Raymond, press conference report, *The New York Times*, November 14, 1958.

14. The quotation is from President Truman's State of the Union message, January 9, 1952.

15. Radio and television address, March 8, 1955, upon his return from a two weeks visit to Southeast Asia.

16. The Day We Didn't Go to War" by Chalmers M. Roberts, *The Reporter*, Vol. 11, No. 14 (September 14, 1954) pp. 31-35.

17. "How Dulles Averted War" by James Shepley, *Life*, Vol. 40 (January 16, 1956) pp. 70-80.

[LC]

49

[LC]

## BRINKMANSHIP AND THE AVERTING OF WAR

On January 11, 1956, James Shepley, one of Life Magazine's able reporters, published an article on "How Mr. Dulles Averted War." The article created a furor. It was bitterly attacked by many here and abroad. Others as vigorously supported the propositions it advanced. From that debate the word "brinkmanship" came to have a new and special meaning in the English language. It now suggests a particular approach to the conduct of foreign policy. What is that approach and what today, after the experience of two and a half years, can be said about it?

Shepley said that in the conduct of his office Mr. Dulles had done two things: he had radically revised the "containment" policy of the Truman administration and he had altered drastically the concept of the job of Secretary of State.

He quotes Mr. Dulles as saying, "You have to take chances for peace, just as you have to take chances in war. Some say we were brought to the verge of war. Of course we were brought to the verge of war. The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost. We've had to look it square in the face--on the question of enlarging the Korean war, on the question of getting into the Indochina war, on the question of Formosa. We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action."

None but the most visionary take issue with the view that risks must be run to maintain any kind of acceptable peace and that in today's world the unavoidable risks in standing up to the Soviet-Chinese-Communist drive for world hegemony are very great indeed.

The issue of "brinkmanship" is not then one of willingness to accept necessary risks. The issue is rather one of the policy and method used in selecting and managing the risks which are to be taken--what Mr. Dulles calls "the necessary art."

We can get an insight into Mr. Dulles' conception of "the necessary art" from other portions of the Shepley article, those portions which describe the new policy, the policy of "deterrence", developed by Mr. Dulles to take the place of the policy of "containment." Shepley says that the policy of deterrence is based on the proposition that wars are caused by miscalculation. He then quotes from Mr. Dulles' famous January, 1954, speech before the Council on Foreign Relations. "Local defense must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliation power. A potential aggressor must know that he cannot always prescribe battle conditions that suit him. . . . The way to deter aggression is for the free community to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with means of its own choosing."

Shepley goes on to explain that Mr. Dulles was not thinking of attacks on Moscow but of such retaliation as would make a Communist military venture of any size unprofitable. It was his intention to make the punishment fit the crime. He quotes Mr. Dulles as saying that the best example of what he meant was the retaliation planned, if necessary, against the Chinese Communists, either in connection with Korea or Indochina. "They were specific targets reasonably related to the area. They did not involve massive destruction of great population centers like Shanghai, Peking or Canton. Retaliation must be on a selective basis. The important thing is that the aggressor know in advance that he is going to lose more than he can win. He doesn't have to lose much more. It just has to be something more. If the equation is clearly going to be against him, he won't go in."

51

[LC]

On another occasion Mr. Dulles indicated that a nuclear attack upon the new industrial complex in Manchuria was the type of punishment he had in mind.

Now what are the essential elements of this "necessary art", the art of brinkmanship as it was conceived by Mr. Dulles in January, 1956: They are the following: (1) the drawing of a line to avoid miscalculation by the enemy; (2) deterrence, letting the enemy know that we are prepared to take strong action if he violates that line, and (3) retaliation, the ability and will to punish the aggressor by making him lose more by his aggression than he can possibly win. The assertion was that this policy had prevented the "big hydrogen war but the littler wars as well." The implication was that it would continue to do so over the "long haul."

Serious questions can be raised as to the historical accuracy of the assertion. Did the heroic defense of the Republic of Korea forces, supported by our Army, Navy and Air Forces using conventional weapons, have no role in bringing about the Korean armistice? Did the threat of retaliation save Dien Bien Phu or prevent the partition of Indochina? Was Formosa not defensible without the threat of a nuclear attack on Manchuria? The Korean war, however, was brought to an end, the fighting in Indonesia ceased and Formosa was not attacked. It cannot be demonstrated that Mr. Dulles' diplomacy had no part in these results. It is highly debatable, however, that it would have been wise or moral for the United States to have initiated a nuclear attack on Manchuria had those results not been achieved. In any case, it would seem to have been unwise to boast of the successes of a policy of threats the seriousness of which one did not expect to be called upon to demonstrate by action. Such boasts encourage the enemy to test and challenge the policy and thus tend to undercut any prospect that the policy will continue to be effective in the future.

But the important question is not whether the reconstruction of past history. The problem now is whether the policy of brinkmanship is, under today's conditions, "the necessary art." And what of the future?

The interesting thing is that today it is not we but the Russians who seem to be pursuing a policy of brinkmanship. During the recent Quemoy-Matsu crisis, Mr. Eisenhower and Mr. Dulles were silent about deterrence and about retaliation. They condemned the use of force in the pursuit of aggressive aims. They emphasized their determination that the Chinese Nationalists not be driven from Quemoy and Matsu by force of arms. But there were no threats of punishment of aggression by nuclear attack "on targets reasonably related to the area" such as the Manchurian industrial complex. Admiral Burke stated that Quemoy and Matsu could be re-supplied and defended against conventional attack for the indefinite future. This would suggest that in the Quemoy-Matsu crisis we were pretty well back to a policy of "containment" and local defense at the point of attack with conventional weapons.

Mr. Krushehev, on the other hand, in the letter to Mr. Eisenhower, which Mr. Eisenhower properly rejected as being offensive beyond the limits of acceptable diplomatic discourse, drew lines, made threats and suggested targets for retaliatory attack reasonably related to the area. In referring to United States naval forces Mr. Krushchev said, "In the age of nuclear and rocket weapons of unprecedented power and rapid action these once formidable warships are fit, in fact, for nothing but courtesy visits and gun salutes, and can serve as targets for the right types of rockets." This suggests that Mr. Krushchev believes his lead in ICBM's has now turned the tables on Mr. Dulles and that it be that he can play at brinkmanship.

Brinkmanship is one kind of policy if it is backed up by an overwhelming superiority in nuclear weapons and means for their accurate and selective delivery. For then it is unlikely that the threats necessarily implied by deterrence will be test-

52

[Lc]

ed, the possibility that one will in fact have to retaliate is low, and it is possible to draw arbitrary lines not closely related to the political and military realities. But brinkmanship is quite a different policy if it is not backed up by overwhelming superiority. The game ceases to be analagous to cops and robbers. It becomes a contest combining the principles of chess and those of stud poker played for enormous stakes. The prospect that threats will in fact be tested rises. The retaliation necessary to demonstrate that the threat was serious may have to be carried out. Otherwise, if the threat is tested and is abandoned under pressure, it will be revealed as having been a bluff.

Under today's conditions, where brinkmanship is no longer our unilateral perogative, modifications in the "necessary art" would seem to be in order. What modifications come to mind?

In the first place, greater care is called for, under the new conditions, in the determination of the issues and places which merit the full commitment of United States prestige and power. It is important that the issues so backed be clearly definable and that they lend themselves to rational and consistent explanation. As reliance upon the threat of the use of purely physical power becomes more dubious as a policy, it becomes more important to assure ourselves of wide and convinced support in the minds of men. Certain issues of principle command wide support of peoples and governments across the non-communist world. One of these principles is that military force, across recognized international boundaries shall not be used as an instrument of policy. The principle that indirect aggression should not be condoned, and that it is proper to use direct military means to counter it, has far less support. The islands of Quemoy and Matsu, in the minds of many people in the world, do not logically fall within a recognized boundary. An attack upon them does not therefore appear to be aggression and their defense does not command widespread support.

Similarly it becomes important to consider, in addition to the issues involved, the location, importance, and military defensibility of the places to be defended. Formosa and Japan are easier to defend, particularly if only non-nuclear weapons are to be used, than are Quemoy and Matsu or Nepal. No simple formula is available for determining the proper weight to be given to issues of principle as against considerations of military defensibility. Berlin, though militarily against Russian division only through the use of nuclear weapons, if then, must be defended. We could hardly live with ourselves if we permitted the two million West Berliners, who have shown exceptional courage in standing up to the pressure of surrounding communism, to be overrun by military attack or surrender because of the threat of attack. The history of the Berlin situation is such that there is wide understanding of why the West must support this militarily unsound position with the full commitment of its power and prestige. But where the history of the situation is not so clear, more weight has to be given to the military defensibility of the local position through means other than nuclear retaliation. The suppression of the Hungarian revolution was as offensive to the sensibilities of mankind as would be the invasion of West Berlin. But the history of that situation was not such as to give a foundation of political support to our threatening to use nuclear weapons in support of the Hungarian freedom fighters.

Two further corollaries flow from these considerations of a world in which brinkmanship can be played by more than one player. One is that we should be wise to rebuild our non-nuclear military capabilities. The other is that we must develop the necessary fortitude to stand up against the brinkmanship threats of the Soviet Union and do what we can to decrease the effectiveness of these threats in influencing the policy of others.

53

[LC]

Our military planning over recent years contemplated that, if Quemoy and Matsu were attacked in such a manner as to persuade the President that the attack was a prelude to an attack on Formosa, nuclear weapons would be used in their defense. Little advance attention was given to the problem of re-supplying the islands to carry out a protracted defense against concentrated artillery or air attack using conventional weapons. When the artillery attack came the unwisdom of our initiating the use of nuclear weapons was evident. The loss of prestige involved in retreating under fire was also evident. The upshot was a rapidly improvised, but at least temporarily effective, resupply effort. The chance of avoiding, on the one hand, retreat under fire and, on the other, the initiating by us of nuclear war rested on our ability to take effective non-nuclear action. The implication would seem to be clear that a reversal of our policy of the last few years of shrinking our conventional military capabilities is called for.

The other side of the equation is fortitude in standing firm in the face of Soviet nuclear threats and blackmail, in other words, Soviet brinkmanship. This requires that we maintain nuclear retaliatory capabilities--second strike capabilities--that cannot be taken out by surprise attack and whose solid power make Soviet threats to use nuclear weapons unconvincing. If we were ever to surrender positions of major importance under such threats, Mr. Dulles' "falling domino" theory could in fact have substance.

The final point about brinkmanship played by more than one nation is that it can introduce a general instability into the equations of international strategy. Threats and counter-threats, in the age of nuclear weapons systems requiring re-action in a matter of minutes, can become intolerably dangerous. Negotiations are now under way at Geneva with the Russians concerning the scientific basis for arrangements which would significantly reduce the possibility of successful surprise attack. These negotiations may point the way to escape from the greatest hazards of the now "unacceptable art."

54

[LC]

SYMMETRY AND INTENSITY OF GREAT
POWER INVOLVEMENT IN LIMITED WARS

I

The purpose of this paper is to discuss two concepts which merit attention in thinking about limited wars in a bi-polar, nuclear age. One is the concept of "symmetry or asymmetry" in the relative degree of involvement of the two great powers in a limited war. This involves an analysis of the relationship of "limits" to "sanctuaries." The second is the concept of "intensity". This involves an analysis of the relationship of purpose to means in limited wars.

In a bi-polar world the two major coalitions have an interest--one might call it a stake--in the outcome of every political conflict important enough to be dignified with the word war--no matter how limited that war may be. In an age of developed ICBM's and sizeable stockpiles of nuclear weapons there is little doubt that both sides possess means, if they choose to use them, adequate to produce effects greater than the other side's stake in the limited war--no matter how big that stake may be. The question for the major powers with respect to limited war in today's world is therefore not whether they have adequate destructive capabilities to overbalance by retribution whatever stake the other side may have in the situation about which the limited war is being contested. The question is rather whether the initiation by one side of the use of any given level of means is wise (a) in view of the expansion in the means employed by the other side which must be anticipated as the other side's probable answer to the increase to be initiated by the first side and (b) in the light of the probable consequences for the objectives of the first side of a limited war fought at the level of intensity which will probably result from the chain of action and reaction to be anticipated.

By way of introduction to the analysis it may be useful to list several obvious points.

The first is that there is a distinction between the means actually employed by a major power in support of its objectives in a limited war and those that it potentially can bring to bear. Both those potentially available and those actually employed bear on the outcome but in a different way.

The second is that the means actually employed can be roughly graded as to intensity. One can start with normal diplomatic and political support; go on to more intense advice and propaganda support; to the furnishing of economic and military supplies and the active training of personnel; to manpower support in gradations from volunteers to participation by satellites or allies on to direct and open military participation by the great power itself; and the military participation by the major power can be graded from air and sea support to direct participation by all services; the weapons used by the supporting forces can be conventional, tactical atomic, or without restriction; the geographic area subject to hostilities can be expanded by gradations to any given approximation to a global conflict. The possible gradations and combinations of gradations do not fall neatly on a linear scale of intensity. It is, however, generally meaningful to say that one set of means involves a greater intensity of major power intervention than some other set of means.

The third point is that any limited war is by definition a war of sanctuaries. A limited war is a war in which the full potential means available to the participants are not employed--in which there is a gap between means potentially employable and

55

[LC]

those actually employed. Looked at from the point of view of one side the gap between the means his side could use but does not use is a measure of the degree to which the war is limited. Looked at from the point of view of the other side that same gap is a measure of the sanctuary which it enjoys. In the Korean war we had the means to, but did not, engage in hot pursuit, bomb beyond the Yalu, go to full mobilization, use atomic weapons, or spread the war generally to China or to Russia. From our point of view these were limits which we placed on our involvement. From the Russian and Chinese points of view the fact that we stayed within these limits was a measure of the sanctuary which they enjoyed.

Similarly the Russians could have intervened directly rather than through North Korean satellite forces, Chinese volunteers and a limited number of Soviet air groups operating from Manchurian bases in the guise of Chinese air groups. The three fighter fields which we had in South Korea and the two ports, Inchon and Pusan, on which our forces depended for logistic and air support, could have been attacked by IL 28's which both the Chinese and Russians had available in large numbers. From the communist standpoint these were limitations which they placed upon their involvement. From our standpoint these limitations represented the sanctuary which we enjoyed. We supplied our troops with huge quantities of supplies through a highly vulnerable logistic supply system which was at no time subjected to attack. Our troops fought under a sky completely dominated by fighters operating from a small number of fields protected by sanctuary. We bombed enemy troops and supply lines in North Korea from bases on Okinawa and Japan themselves protected by sanctuary.

In any analysis of limited war situations one of the basic points of interest is the symmetry or asymmetry between the limitations on each side and conversely between the sanctuaries enjoyed by each side. Another basic point of interest is the general level of intensity of the war as a function of the means used by both sides.

## II

It may be useful to attempt a graphic presentation of the relationships involved. The quantities are not precisely measurable and the relationships more complex than can be presented by a graph. The attempt may, however, have some limited utility in suggesting further questions and avenues for exploration.

On the accompanying graph the Y axis, on a scale from zero to 100, represents the actual political-economic-military support being given by the United States and its allies to the side which it favors in a limited war situation, as a percentage of the support it and its allies have the capability of giving. The X axis similarly represents actual Soviet-Chinese-Communist bloc support being given to the side it favors as a percentage of the full support of which it is capable.

As pointed out earlier it is impossible precisely to quantify anything as complicated as political-economic-military support. For the purposes of illustration, however, let us say that the initiation of all-out war, including the dropping of bombs of the largest size on Moscow and other Russian population centers with the purpose of complete annihilation of the major power supporting the opponents of the side we favor in the limited war, represents 100% of our potential support and therefore 100 on the Y axis. Let us say that mere political and diplomatic support represents 10; that the addition of economic support, military assistance and the training of personnel brings the figure to 20 or 30 depending on the magnitudes and quantities involved. Let us say that direct and overt military participation by the United States and its allies with conventional arms falls somewhere between 30-50 percent

56

[LC]

depending on whether the support is merely air and naval, or also includes ground forces, and the volume and intensity of the support. Let us say that support with atomic weapons, short of an attack on Russia, lies somewhere between 50 and 70 depending on whether the area of combat is simultaneously spread and on the nature and quantity of nuclear weapons used. And let us say that support including direct nuclear attack on Russian forces or Russian territory brings one to figures from 70 to 100% depending on the nature of the engagement and the extent to which it approximates the full employment of all our available resources.

The X axis represents comparable magnitudes for Russia. Support through satellites or volunteers may play a somewhat bigger role in the middle ranges of possible Russian support but in general the scale might be roughly similar.

If we now examine the situation in a limited war at any given point in time with respect to the nature of major power involvement in the war, we should be able to find data for estimating a figure for the Y coordinate and for the X coordinate and thereby determine a point on our graph.

On the graph the dotted line from O, the origin, to T. W., or total war, represents a line of symmetry. At any point on that line both major powers are supporting the side they favor with the same percentage of the potential support they could give. Any point above the line indicates relatively higher United States involvement. Any point below the line indicates relatively higher U.S.S.R. involvement.

The numbers on the X and Y axes of our chart could be reversed, running from 100 at the origin to zero at the extremity, and could then represent the degree of sanctuary enjoyed by each side. Our discussion of symmetry and asymmetry would then involve a comparison of the degree of sanctuary enjoyed by each side, rather than a comparison of the percentage of potential capability actually committed by each side. Any point above the line would represent relatively higher sanctuary enjoyed by the United States, any point below the line relatively higher sanctuary enjoyed by the U.S.S.R.

### III

There are obvious and strong forces tending toward a situation of symmetry. If we assume a rough equality both in overall potential and in potential applicable to the local situation, and if the Russians permit us a high level of involvement without stepping up their involvement to match ours, they concede us the probability of success in limited war. If we fail to match the degree of Russian involvement in a limited war situation, as we failed to in the Hungarian situation, we concede the outcome to the Russian side. Each side faces the danger of spreading collapse of the peripheral area between the two sides if it consistently concedes to the other side a higher level of involvement, assuming overall and local capabilities to be roughly equal. There are therefore obvious pressures for each side to meet an increase in involvement by the other side with an increase by its side and thus an inherent tendency in the system toward symmetry.

The interesting question, therefore, is that of determining what factors may cause asymmetry in spite of this tendency toward symmetry.

One obvious set of factors which may cause asymmetry is the relative importance to the two sides of the stakes involved in the limited conflict. A limited war in Central America which threatened the Panama Canal would involve stakes for the United States far greater than for the U. S.S.R. Asymmetry in the degree of involvement

58

[LC]

could then be expected. The revolt in Hungary apparently involved stakes which were considered by the U.S.S.R. to be greater than the stakes considered to be involved by the United States. In general one can say that differing evaluations of the stakes involved tends toward asymmetry. Geographical propinquity is one of the factors apt to lead to such differing appraisals.

Another set of factors tending to asymmetry concerns the relative capabilities of the two sides for intervention. This set of factors has two parts. One part is the relative capabilities of the two sides for total war. In the days when we had a monopoly of atomic weapons (even though these weapons were small and few in number by today's standards and their potential effectiveness largely offset by the Russian superiority in ready ground forces and tactical air support) we could aspire to asymmetry in our favor even in a geographic location as close to Russia as North Korea. With a Russian lead in ICBM's one would expect this factor to shift in the other direction. The other part of this set of factors concerns the relative capabilities of the two sides for various levels of limited intervention in the specific situation in which the crisis occurs. If we have low conventional capabilities for military intervention in a given situation, while the U.S.S.R.-Chinese Communists bloc has high capabilities, we cannot expect to maintain a relationship in our favor sufficient for success without raising the level of means to some level where we have at least an equal capability for intervention--in the assumed case, not without bringing nuclear weapons into play or spreading the area of conflict. Now that both sides have the potential of intervening with tactical or strategic nuclear weapons, relative capabilities for nuclear intervention in specific geographic situations obviously become extremely pertinent.

The third set of factors which can affect the symmetry or asymmetry to be expected in a given situation is relative will. It is often asserted that if our leadership had the guts to raise the level of our intervention to some high point the Russian leaders would not have the guts to match it and we would safely enjoy the asymmetry necessary for victory in any given situation. Generally no supporting evidence is advanced to back up such assertions. Nevertheless differences in will can be important and can affect the symmetry of involvement. The difficulty that analysis faces at this point is not merely that facts bearing on a judgment are hard to come by, but also that it is difficult to arrive at an objective analysis of those that do exist.

The analysis so far suggests the following interpretation of the massive retaliation doctrine. In view of our then great relative capabilities for general nuclear war, and assuming a superior willingness on our part to raise our level of intervention in a limited war to a high level, it was assumed that we could count on a sufficient asymmetry in our involvement in any limited war relative to the Russian involvement to give us the margin necessary for success even with relatively far weaker conventional war capabilities. It was expected that the Russians would therefore be deterred from initiating limited wars which involved stakes important to us. As a result, it was argued, we could safely balance the budget at a relatively low level even though this meant cutting down on our conventional war forces. Today there is serious question whether the objective conditions exist which would be necessary to make the massive retaliation doctrine realistic.

## IV

Let us turn now to the second subject of our paper--the relationship of the means used by both sides to the accomplishment of the objectives of our side, the securing of our stake, in the conflict. In a limited war in today's world our objective is not to acquire real estate for ourselves but to assist a political group,

59

[LC]

seeking to achieve or maintain its independence from Soviet-communist domination, in securing its political power over a given geographic area. The Soviet objective is to deny political control to the group we are supporting and to assist some opposing group in achieving or maintaining political control over the same area. We wish a given group to achieve or maintain political control and wish to deny control to some group supported by the Soviet bloc. The Soviet bloc wishes its group to achieve political control and to deny it to the group we are backing. In a limited war with such objectives physical destruction may help in denying control to the opposing side. Indiscriminate destruction beyond a certain level may not, however, help our side achieve control. With today's weapons it is possible to conceive levels of destruction such that little would be left worth controlling.

The level of violence which characterizes a limited war therefore has an important bearing on whether we can achieve our positive objective of helping the group we are assisting to achieve control as well as our negative objective of denying control to the enemy. It may well be that in this area we face a more difficult problem than do our enemies. The groups we are supporting are generally less cohesive, less regimented and disciplined than the tightly knit communist cadres which our opponents are supporting. The groups we support may, however, have a broader base of popular support--as they did in Korea and as we undoubtedly would have found to exist in Hungary as well.

A high level of destruction may be unavoidable, as it was in Korea, and not be incompatible with the consolidation of political control by the side we support. Destruction may, however, reach a level so different in degree as to represent a difference in kind, in a war involving a symmetrical use of nuclear weapons by both sides, or even the asymmetrical use if the sizes or numbers used are not rigorously restricted. Information in the public domain indicates that the lethal area of fall-out for a one megaton ground burst is approximately 600 square miles and for a ten megaton weapon 6,000 square miles, an area approximately the size of New Jersey. It now is possible to make big weapons with lower fission yield and therefore lower fall-out, but there is no indication that the proportion of fission yield in small weapons has yet been materially reduced. Any war in which as many as 200 ground bursts averaging 50 KT or 1,000 ground bursts averaging 10 KT take place is going to be a highly destructive war unless the population density per square mile is very low indeed.

It is hard to see how the number and yield of nuclear weapons employed in a limited war can be kept at a low level unless the conditions under which the war is fought are highly asymmetrical. If one side initiates the use of nuclear weapons and delivers them from airplanes or missile launchers based outside the combat area it is conceivable that it can wipe the slate clean in that area in the initial blow. If it is then assumed that the other side accepts an asymmetrical situation and refrains itself from introducing nuclear weapons into the area from outside and does not expand the limits of its involvement by reducing the sanctuary enjoyed by the first side, the conflict may be quickly and one-sidedly resolved with only small numbers of nuclear weapons having been employed.

If, however, the slate is not wiped clean--if the other side has air bases or missile launchers within the geographic territory involved in the limited war which have not been eliminated in the initial attack--it is highly unlikely that those air bases and missile launchers will not be used. The war will then involve the use of nuclear weapons by both sides and the level of destruction will rise to unpredictable levels.

60

[LC]

The even more important question, however, is the one of whether the Soviet bloc will permit us to enjoy the degree of asymmetry assumed by the proposition that we can introduce nuclear weapons into the conflict from outside the initial geographic area, while they cannot. If they also introduce nuclear weapons from outside the area but do not expand the geographic area of the conflict, the situation will again be symmetrical but it is difficult to see how the war can be brought to a conclusion without the total destruction of the geographic territory control of which is in dispute. If they initiate an expansion of the geographic area subject to attack, we run the risk that they may wipe the slate clean in the expanded area. We will then be faced with a decision as to whether we should initiate a still further expansion of the area subject to attack, perhaps even an attack on Russian territory itself, with the grave risk that the war will then become total rather than remain limited.

V

The upshot of the foregoing analysis is to suggest that the structure of possible limited war situations in today's world gives rise to two sets of considerations bearing on the decisions of the great powers as to the level and magnitude of their involvement. These two sets of considerations lead in somewhat different directions.

On the one hand, one set of considerations tends to push the great powers in the direction of seeking a sufficient relative commitment to give their side the prospect of military success or "victory". Where an equal level of relative commitment--a point on our line of symmetry--would appear to give inadequate prospects of military success, these considerations impel that side to seek some point at which an asymmetrical relationship--a point above the line of symmetry--can be stabilized. The more asymmetrical the relationship, the greater the prospect of "victory" in the limited war. In this context "victory" refers exclusively to military success.

On the other hand, the second set of considerations causes the great powers to seek as low a level of over-all intensity as possible in order to have the prospect of achieving "victory" in a meaningful political sense. If the point at which relative levels of great power commitment become stabilized is too far out from the origin O and too much in the direction of T.W. on our chart, the over-all level of destruction to be anticipated will be so great as to deny the possibility of "political victory" even if military stand off or "military victory" is achieved.

In line with the commonly accepted maxim that military strategy must find its place within the parameters set by grand strategy or, as Clausewitz called it, "policy", the primacy of our second set of considerations over the first logically follows. To turn again to our chart, the logic of the analysis leads us to the conclusion that we should seek a level of U.S. commitment in limited war situations which is not so far out in the direction from O to T.W. to deny us the possibility of political success. Within that consideration, we should seek to stabilize relative great power commitment at a point sufficiently high in relationship to the line O to T.W. to give us a sufficient prospect of military success.

VI

In conclusion, certain factors should be pointed out which have not been given adequate attention in this preliminary analysis.

One factor is that of discontinuities in levels of commitment. A major dividing line is crossed when great powers intervene with their own forces. A second and probably even more significant dividing line is crossed when either of the great powers

61

[LC]

initiates the use of nuclear weapons of whatever size or purpose. Our discussion has
tended to view levels of commitment as falling evenly along a spectrum. It is in fact
not a continuous line; it contains a number of distinct and important discontinuities.

Another factor to which inadequate attention has been devoted is the nature of
the great power "stake" in limited war situations. It is likely that the issue
immediately raised in the possible limited war situation will be fuzzed up. It is
not likely always to be as clear cut as the invasion of South Korea. It may well be
a minor move along a trend, the end point of the trend representing a stake important
to the great powers.

A third factor which has been given inadequate attention is the increased risk
that limited wars will spread into general war as the level of great power commitment
rises. This line of thought has been given much treatment in other analyses and has,
therefore, not been elaborated here. These considerations operate in the same direc-
tion as the political considerations arising in the local context and reinforce the
pressure to stabilize relative great power commitment at a point not too far from the
origin 0.

Despite the above noted limitations of the analysis, it is hoped that a line of
approach has been suggested which will merit further exploration.

62

[LC]

EUROPE AND THE NATO SHIELD

by

Arnold Wolfers

I

Pressures to extend the activities of NATO into fields other than the military, or actually to shift the emphasis to political, economic and cultural objectives, have been so strong in recent years that one wonders whether there has not been a growing tendency, particularly in Europe, to lose sight of the purpose for which NATO was established and which makes it vital to the United States. Essentially, NATO is a multilateral military alliance for the protection of Western and Southern Europe against Soviet conquest, a means of denying these areas and their resources to the Soviets. If the members of the alliance, on one side or the other of the Atlantic, were ever to reach the conclusion that the threat of military attack from the East had vanished or that it could not be countered effectively by common military effort, NATO would have lost its original *raison d'être*, though it might be continued for the sake of what today are secondary non-military functions, such as political conciliations and economic collaboration. It should be added, that the primacy of the military purpose of NATO, as it exists today, does not preclude the desirability or even the necessity of extending its scope beyond purely military matters. As Ruth C. Lawson has pointed out in these pages earlier this year,¹ there is little hope for reliable military collaboration among countries that do not succeed in attaining a reasonable degree of harmony between their political aims and policies. Cyprus, Suez and Algeria are symptomatic of the problems NATO faces in the political field.

By calling NATO an agreement and organization for the military defense of Europe, one has not answered the question whether NATO belongs to one or the other of two different types of defensive enterprises. Though not intended as such in its early period, it may in the eyes of its Continental European members have become nothing but a "guarantee pact" by which the United States, together with other insular countries, has undertaken to assure European military immunity against Soviet attack, while Europe's contribution consists in permission to her insular allies to use Continental territory for their military operations. It would be a rare thing for major powers to agree to be thus "guaranteed". On the other hand, NATO may be interpreted in Europe, too, as a pact of mutual military assistance in the full sense of the term, with the Continental countries expected to make a major military effort for the purpose of their own defense. In order to judge which of these alternatives is foremost in the minds and hearts of the peoples of Europe, one must focus attention on the European attitude towards what is now known as the NATO Shield.

The distinction between the Sword and the Shield is an exceedingly useful one. The Sword consists of strategic nuclear striking power, exclusively American and British, as long as no European country joins the "strategic nuclear club". The Sword has not been placed under the authority of any NATO command. Its establishment and operation are, therefore, none of Continental Europe's business. The Shield, on the other hand, is composed of the forces on land, sea and in the air that have been placed at the disposal of NATO by both its non-Continental and its Continental members, the major part of which are the ground forces under SHAPE command for the defense of the plains of Central Europe. Since Europe's military contribution, aside from Britain's modest addition to the strength of the Sword, it is exclusively to the Shield, Europe's interest in NATO as a pact of mutual assistance can be measured in terms of her confidence in the Shield and her willingness

63

[LC]

to help build up its strength. This interest and confidence appear to have fallen
very low, dangerously low if a strong Shield is considered indispensable for the
effective defense of Europe. Whether and in what ways a strong Shield is, in fact,
indispensable will be discussed later, with a view to discovering the causes of
Europe's reluctance to make greater efforts on behalf of the Shield.

In the early years of NATO, those Europeans who gave thought to matters of defense were no less convinced than their American counterparts that a powerful Shield was essential to the defense of Europe. There were several reasons for this conviction. Much of the thinking at that time was still in terms of the two World Wars in which Germany, a mighty land power, was defeated with the help of very large ground forces. The dawn of the atomic age had not yet affected the outlook, despite the fact that the United States was at that time enjoying its shortlived atomic monopoly. As a matter of fact, atomic bombs were then in such short supply that nobody could expect either America's atomic threat to be sufficient in itself to deter the Soviets or an American atomic bombardment of the Soviet Union to prevent an advance of large Soviet land forces across Western Europe. Thus, a Shield to which the United States would make its contribution but which would be largely composed of the military forces of a rearmed Europe was considered the chief common need and enterprise. It was in line with this conviction of all the NATO governments that the NATO planners in February 1952 at Lisbon set the target of slightly more than 90 divisions for the Shield forces north of the Alps. While only about 34 - 40 were to be combat-ready, on-the-line divisions, it was assumed at that time that the kind of war for which to prepare would permit the mobilization of the remaining divisions during the first few months of hostilities, an assumption no longer considered valid today. Because the American contribution of six divisions and existing American reserve divisions were not expected to be increased in order to meet the Lisbon target, all the additional requirements of the Shield were to be met by Europe.

II

In view of what has been said and done in Europe since 1952, there can be
no room for doubt that the European concern for the Shield has taken a sharp
downward turn since Lisbon. In the case of Britain, the down-grading of the Shield
to a secondary role became a matter of explicit official doctrine when in December
1956 the British announced a reduction in their manpower contribution to the Shield
and subsequently announced plans for further reductions. The French pulled the
equivalent of four divisions out of their SHAPE contingent for operations in Algeria.
It is significant that when this happened there was no hint of any French desire to
see other NATO powers make supplementary contributions to the Shield until France
could help take care of her own Continental protection again. The Adenauer government remained staunchly committed to a German contribution but whittled down the
prospective size of the future German forces from 500,000 to 350,000 men, and cut
the duration of active military service, as did other European countries. The
present strength of the Shield in the central region is estimated at the equivalent
of some 16 to 19 full-strength, combat-ready divisions plus an unspecified and small
number of readily available reserve divisions.

Some may argue that the change that took place in the military estimate of the
value of the Shield was not confined to Europe, or that Europe, in fact, simply
followed the lead of the United States. A shift did take place in American defense
planning under the Eisenhower Administration, a shift of emphasis from conventional
forces to strategic nuclear striking power, known as the New Look. The idea was to

64

[LC]

concentrate the United States' effort as far as NATO was concerned on the Sword, or Grand Deterrent. But the change in the planned composition and number of United States armed forces cannot be interpreted as a sign that official American military policy was turning against the idea of a powerful Shield. In the American view, American concentration on the Sword was to be accompanied by continued European preoccupation with the Shield. Therefore, the United States, often to the displeasure of some of its allies, pressed hard for speedy and ample German rearment and took a critical attitude both toward the withdrawal of French divisions from Europe to North Africa and toward the British White Papers of 1956 and 1957 which announced the planned reduction of British forces in Europe. While it is true that the American people were no more willing that the peoples of Europe to set up large land forces, it seemed natural to Americans to assume that nations close to the endangered Continental land frontier would seek to defend their territory by establishment of a powerful Shield.

In drawing a distinction between the American and European attitude, I am not suggesting that there was any disagreement among the military leaders and planners at SHAPE. In all likelihood, the present target of thirty full-strength active divisions, as the minimum requirement for the central region, enjoyed and still enjoys the full support of the military in NATO and even that of the governments of the Continental members of NATO. Therefore, if it appears less and less likely that Europe will meet the present target even though approved by its own governments, the reason must lie in an attitude of the European public that prevents these governments from attempting to raise the necessary forces.

The lack of interest the European public is showing in the strength of the Shield and the corresponding reluctance to consent to greater sacrifices on its behalf are phenomena calling for explanation. On first sight, this lack of interest is surprising in view of the fact that for centuries practically all nations of the Continent have taken for granted the need for substantial land forces, even at times when there was no overwhelmingly strong and menacing land power in sight that could seriously jeopardize their independent existence. Given Europe's rich military experience and traditional sophistication in military affairs, disinterest would be even more surprising if it were found to be entirely unreasonable. Conceivably it is not; it may give evidence, instead, of objections that deserve serious attention.

One of the reasons often put forward to account for the European indifference toward the Shield, and even toward NATO in general, is an allegedly widespread European conviction that the Soviets neither intend nor desire a military invasion of Europe. Many of those who favor the idea of "disengagement", meaning the withdrawal of all American and British forces from the Continent, do believe that Western Europe will be safe even if its land armies are reduced to a police force capable merely of handling internal troubles. But there has been no lack of evidence that the public at large fears the Soviets and their military might. Fear was undisguised when the Soviet tanks rolled westward into Budapest, and much anxiety has been expressed whenever the United States showed any sign that could be interpreted as foreshadowing a return to isolationism, as in the days of Mr. Dulles' threat of an "agonizing reappraisal" and of the "Radford Plan".

An unquestionably large factor in the lack of concern for a strong Shield, after 1952 and at least down to 1957, was the then prevailing confidence in the American guarantee, specifically in what America's nuclear Sword could and would do to protect Europe. Like the United States, Europe had its eyes fixed on deterrence, which was identified with the Grand Deterrent of massive nuclear retaliation. Few looked beyond--or dared look beyond--deterrence to ask themselves what would happen if, despite the threat of American nuclear retaliation, the Soviet Union should

65

[LC]

launch an attack on Europe. Since 1957 this strategic guarantee has ceased to be as convincing as it was before. When in 1957, after the Soviets had put their first Sputnik into outer space, it suddenly dawned on Europe that the United States had become vulnerable to Soviet thermonuclear attack, the previously firm conviction that any Soviet attack on Europe would bring the Sword into action was badly shaken. Yet, despite this shattering experience, nothing that has since happened can lead one to believe that Europe has now become more eager to seek security behind a powerful Shield. The French reaction was to demand independent strategic nuclear power for France, a French Sword to substitute, if necessary, for the old Grand Deterrent. Britain had already at an earlier date started to produce its own strategic nuclear striking power, though carefully qualifying the expectation that it could make Britain independent in the use of such power. Since the European reluctance to meet the goal of thirty divisions thus remained untouched by the change that had taken place in the evaluation of the deterrent value of the Sword, its explanation must lie elsewhere.

The chief reason for the lack of European concern for the Shield, I suggest, lies in the fact that NATO strategic doctrine, which is supposed to justify a demand for a minimum of thirty divisions, has not proved convincing to the Europeans. While only a few have had a chance to argue against the NATO planners on the basis of full knowledge of the facts or of the doctrine, there appears to be a kind of intuitive feeling that the reasons underlying the demand for a Shield more powerful than is currently available are not in line with Europe's best interests, if they are not completely unacceptable.

NATO spokesmen have sought to explain why in the light of NATO doctrine thirty front line divisions in the central region constitute a minimum requirement. There are several grounds on which Europe may be taking exception to this explanation, or could reasonably do so if fully informed. Some of the tasks attributed to the Shield may be distasteful because to pursue them even successfully would spell disaster for countries located on the Continent. Other tasks, though exceedingly worthwhile also from a European point of view, may fail to bring forth additional European efforts either because they can be fulfilled, it is believed, with no more than the existing Shield, or instead, because they appear to require forces that exceed anything Europe would be capable of creating.

### III

In order to discover what tasks the NATO planners have in mind, one must rely as an outsider on official and unofficial statements that deal with the mission of the Shield as part of the overall NATO defense strategy. Here one is faced with a real **embarras de richesses**. The Shield, we are told, is to prevent a "quick jump" of Soviet forces across Europe or a "fait accompli" west of the Iron Curtain; it is to stand in the way of "piecemeal Soviet advances" or of indirect Soviet aggression and intimidation; it is to prevent a "war by accident"; it is to serve as a "trip wire" or is designed to deter a conventional attack on Europe; it is to provide the West with a "warning period", hold the enemy in the initial stages of a total war and give NATO a chance to stage a counterattack; it is to prevent the invasion of Europe and thus to save Europe from becoming a battlefield.

Such diversity of objectives would be enough in itself to keep the public puzzled and uncertain about an alleged need for additional ground forces. It also makes a critical analysis of the doctrine and its implications for Europe difficult. In order to facilitate such an analysis, I propose to lump the varied Shield tasks together into a few broad categories, distinguished from one another by the differ-

66

[LC]

ences in strength and type of active ground forces that they would require and justi-
fy.

A distinction between goals of deterrence and goals of defense, which is often
made, would be of little use here, and is in fact highly deceptive. Every element
of a military establishment that is designed to inflict losses on the enemy and
therefore to serve the purposes of defense must also be counted as a factor of de-
terrence; by adding to the punishment that can be inflicted on the enemy, if war
should come, it tends to reduce his inclination to start such a war. In turn,
military forces designed for deterrence are useless--except as a means of bluffing
the enemy--if they are not at the same time fit and intended to serve as means of
defense in case deterrence should fail; one cannot count on deterring an opponent
by a threat that is not serious. Therefore, anything a larger Shield can accomplish
serves both deterrence and defense. If this was overlooked--and not only in Europe--
in the days of unlimited confidence in the Grand Deterrent, it was because such con-
fidence seemed to make it unnecessary even to consider the possibility of war and
defense.

On the other hand, valid distinctions can be drawn within a wide continuum
between what may be called modest, middle range and ambitious tasks, according to
the extent of their military requirements. At one extreme are tasks so modest
that they may lie within the capacity of the present Shield; supplementary effort
on their behalf would represent a waste of precious resources. At the other ex-
treme are tasks so ambitious that even thirty divisions, or thereabouts, would be
inadequate for their fulfillment, in which case any attempt to raise the Shield to
the level planned by NATO would also be useless. If there is any justification,
therefore, to the demand for additional European contributions to the Shield, it
must lie within the middle range group of tasks, the question then being whether
one or more of these particular tasks will appeal to Europe and be likely to elicit
new European efforts on behalf of the Shield.

Among the modest tasks, there is one that has caught the imagination of the
peoples of Continental Europe and is also strongly emphasized in official British
pronouncements. The Shield--or more exactly the American contribution to it--is
expected to serve as a "trip wire", an attack on which would trigger American
strategic nuclear retaliation. Here the Shield is clearly conceived as a supple-
ment to the Sword, not as a substitute. American ground forces in West Germany
have been welcomed by the Germans and by the rest of Europe chiefly, if not ex-
clusively, as part of the Grand Deterrent and thus as a guarantee that Europe will
not be left to face the Soviets alone. One cannot help suspecting that much of the
effort Europe has put into strengthening the Shield by its own contributions has
been motivated by a desire to satisfy the United States that Europe is willing to
cooperate, and thus to prevent an increase of isolationist inclinations in America.
The idea of the trip wire makes good sense, though some doubts have been expressed
recently whether it is necessary under present circumstances. But, whatever its
value as a supplementary deterrent, it cannot justify a demand for a stronger Shield
than is currently available; six American divisions are a potent and adequate trip
wire.

There is another task that it modest when measured against the presently
available active forces under SHAPE command. As has been said by almost everyone
who has discussed the role of NATO, there is constant danger of what Mr. Dulles has
called Soviet "nibblings" or what General Norstad refers to as "a probing operation"
or "a border incident negligible in itself" that "might flare out of control" and
lead to war by accident or miscalculation.² Because the danger of "nibblings" can
hardly be denied, even the most pacifist Europeans must see the need for forces on
the spot capable, as the London *Economist* said, of nipping such attacks in the bud.³

67

[LC]

But the question is whether larger forces than are already available are needed to fulfill this task. One may assume that General Norstad's insistence on the need for at least thirty full strength divisions for the central region is calculated on the basis of the twenty-two-odd Soviet divisions stationed in East Germany.⁴ It is plausible that something on the order of thirty divisions would be needed to defeat an attack by such a large force and therefore to deter the Soviets from throwing it across the Iron Curtain. However, an attack carried out on such a scale could not qualify as a "nibbling" or be said to have brought about a war by accident.

According to some Germans, German forces alone should in time be able to cope with genuine nibblings. While a mere police force may not be enough, the currently existing forces on the Continent--and eventually Continental forces alone--should be adequate to deal with any "probing operations" or strictly local "piecemeal advances", not to speak of infiltrations and acts of indirect aggression taking place as part of the Cold War. Thus, neither the trip wire function nor the defense and deterrence task posed by Soviet nibblings of various types is likely to require or elicit any costly European effort designed to increase the present strength of the Shield.

## IV

Let me turn then to the other extreme at which tasks are set for the Shield that no country or group of countries could expect to accomplish with less than a very considerable military effort. Here, then, we are dealing with what I have called the ambitious goals. I have in mind missions that the ground forces--and supporting tactical forces of the other services--are expected to accomplish during a total nuclear war or, more specifically, in the initial stages of such a war. One can appreciate the importance that NATO planners attach to missions of this kind if one reminds oneself that all NATO planning, until quite recently at least, was based on the assumption that the response of the West to anything above a very minor Soviet attack in Europe would have to be in the nature of massive nuclear retaliation leading to total war.

Put in its most extreme form, the mission of the Shield in such a total war has been defined as "holding the line on the Elbe" until massive retaliation has done its job. As late as 1957, General Norstad justified his demand for larger Shield forces on the ground that the Shield must be able to fulfill its vital mission "of defending all NATO territory" and thus of protecting "our European allies from invasion".⁵ And Chancellor Adenauer, arguing in favor of a major German contribution to the Shield in 1955, stated that only when West Germany joined NATO would she no longer be in danger of becoming "the European battlefield".⁶ It is hard to believe that either Chancellor Adenauer or General Norstad are the victims of a "Maginot Line complex", according to which a Shield if adequate could stop the attacker on the line, and thereby exclude the danger of invasion. If one assumes, as the NATO planners do, that the Soviets will throw their large ground forces into any massive attack on Europe and trigger a total war, either the defending side would have to be strong enough to counter such an attack by an offensive penetration into the territory of the enemy--a degree of strength that no one has dared suggest for NATO--or it must trade space for time and operate a defense in depth.⁷

Therefore, if leading spokesmen for NATO consider it necessary to assure Europe that it will not be subjected to invasion, they must be doing so for fear that a more realistic picture of NATO's abilities might shatter European morale and fighting power. If this is the reasoning behind what they must know to be extravagant promises, they are basing themselves, as Hoag has pointed out,⁸ on a failure to understand the change in outlook that has occurred in Europe since the facts of nuclear life have become more widely appreciated.

68

[LC]

While little has been done to guide the public in acquiring some kind of image of what a total nuclear war would be like--perhaps because the military planners in NATO find it difficult themselves to envisage the course of such a war--the old pre-atomic European fear of the triad "invasion, occupation, liberation" has been overshadowed by a new and greater fear, that of deadly and devastating blows from the air.

Concerning invasion, it is dawning on people that the possibility and extent of devastation of Western Europe from the air is not likely to be any greater if an "invasion by air" is accompanied by an invasion on the ground; on the contrary, the presence of Soviet troops in Europe would rather tend to place restraints on Soviet nuclear bombardment, while the West in turn would have more fruitful targets for its nuclear warheads than the invading Soviet ground forces. Occupation, too, is less frightening if it occurs during a total war in which the Soviets would have little opportunity to deport young people from Western Europe to Siberia, once a particularly gruesome feature of Soviet occupation. Also, a total war is expected to be of very short duration. Finally, as to liberation, a NATO strategy to drive the Russians out of Europe could hardly contemplate a roll back from the coast of Normandy by bombing its way across the length and breadth of Western Europe. If the exchange of nuclear blows gave the West the upper hand and opened the door to a "march on Moscow", the Western counter offensive, one may assume, would aim at the heart of the Soviet Union and be launched, therefore, on the northern and south-eastern flanks of Europe. Such a counter offensive would have much to gain if large bodies of Soviet troops remained out on a limb in the westernmost parts of Europe.

What is actually contemplated as the mission of a powerful Shield in the initial stages of a total war is probably not the prevention of invasion, then, but what General Ridgway has defined as the denial of unopposed conquest⁹ or what has also been called a strategic withdrawal, designed to slow up an enemy advance into Europe.

It is conceivable that an army of thirty divisions putting up dogged resistance during the opening phases of a total war could thereby serve over-all NATO strategy. It might, for instance, facilitate a subsequent counter offensive on the ground; it might prevent IREM launching sites from being overrun before the stocks of missiles and nuclear warheads available to these sites had been exhausted; it might, for a time, do for Britain -- and for American bases there -- what Churchill in 1955 called holding "the Soviet and satellite forces at arm's length in order to prevent short-range air and rocket attacks" on the British Isles.¹⁰

It is most unlikely, however, that Continental Europe, and particularly West Germany, can be attracted to the idea of a stronger Shield if its purpose is to permit a step-by-step withdrawal carried out with utmost resistance. For the actual "battlefield countries", the idea of such a fighting withdrawal across their territories must be a nightmare.

It was practical and reasonable for the Soviet Union in World War II to conduct a scorched earth policy on their retreat, when the outcome of the war depended on events taking place on the ground. But in a total war, nations in the path of an invader can hardly be expected to consent to the complete devastation of their countries--which would be the inevitable consequence of step-by-step resistance--when the outcome of such a war would be decided, literally speaking, far over their heads. From their point of view, unopposed invasion would constitute a far lesser evil. In any case, the invasion would be a shortlived event if the total war turned against the Soviets. If, on the other hand, the exchange of nuclear blows turned against the West, there would be no hope of avoiding invasion anyway, no matter how strong the will and ability to resist it on the ground. It would seem, then,

69

[LC]

that if there is a task a powerful Shield could accomplish in the context of total
war which might appeal to Continental Europe, it would have to be sought in con-
nection with the late rather than the initial stages of such a war. I shall return
later to the question of such a task.

V

From what has been said, it follows that a call for greater European contribu-
tions to the Shield is almost certain to run into insuperable difficulties as long
as it is based on Shield requirements either for the modest tasks contemplated by
NATO, tasks for which the existing forces are adequate, or for the ambitious tasks
which the Shield is supposed to fulfill in the initial phases of a total war but
which are unacceptable to the Continental countries of Western Europe. Therefore,
as suggested hypothetically earlier, if Europe's disinterest and reluctance are to be
overcome, it can only be on the ground of tasks for the Shield that lie somewhere be-
tween the poles of "modest" and "ambitious". Here one enters the controversial
field of limited warfare and the unplowed field of the late rather than the initial
stage of total warfare.

Speaking of limited war first, it must be confessed that, to date, the idea of
such a war fought on European soil is anything but popular on the Continent. On
the contrary, it has become a source of strong apprehension, and these fears will be
perpetuated as long as Europeans are led to believe, erroneously I suggest, that
for the Continental nations limited war must necessarily mean all-out nuclear war
or as long as some Europeans suspect that a limited war on the Continent might
mean American non-participation.

This latter fear is based partly on a semantic misunderstanding. As the term
is used in the United States, in connection with a hypothetical war in Europe,
"limited war" does not imply a restriction on the number of participants, but
rather a limitation of the weapons, targets and battle area. How could the United
States remain aloof from a war in which six of its divisions would become involved
from the very outset? The other apprehension concerning the weapons that are to
be used in a limited war will be dealt with in later pages where it will be shown
that in the face of present NATO doctrine European fears are far from unreasonable
on this count.

There is another source of European misgivings that bears not on limited war
itself but on the mere discussion of the possibility of such a war taking place
on European soil. It is frequently asserted, in the United States as well as in
Europe, that any such discussion will encourage the Soviets to believe the West
will not respond even to relatively substantial attacks on Europe with the use of
its Sword of massive strategic nuclear retaliation. If the debate on limited war
were to change the pattern of Soviet expectations in this way, the Grand Deterrent
which is still Europe's great hope would indeed be weakened. Having indulged my-
self in public speculations about the possibility of limited war in Europe,¹¹ I
would be much disturbed if I thought that such speculations would have the effect
just mentioned. However, it seems to me that a discussion in the West of limited
war will not affect Soviet estimates of where the line runs, beyond which Soviet
moves will provoke the United States to resort to what might well constitute suicid-
al retaliation. The Soviets have only to ask themselves what degree of provocation
would set off such retaliation for, in probability, they will not assume that the
West is more inclined to commit suicide than they are. Therefore, in order to
estimate the limits of permissible provocation, they need only consider what their
reaction would be if the roles were reversed. As a matter of fact, despite its pre-

70

[LC]

sent unpopularity, limited war has recently become the subject of much discussion and of much serious study in Europe.¹²

The figure of a minimum of thirty divisions has been gained, one has reason to believe, mainly by reference to the twenty-two Soviet divisions stationed in East Germany. The present NATO Shield would not be able, it is assumed, to prevent the Soviet forces stationed in and in the immediate neighborhood of East Germany from overrunning Western Europe by means of a surprise attack. Therefore, as things stand today, the Soviets might gamble on the possibility of creating a *fait accompli* in Europe of such dimensions and with such speed that the United States would hesitate, after the fact, to counter with a first-strike nuclear retaliatory blow. At first sight, it seems difficult to understand the hesitation of the Continental countries in making the extra effort necessary to give the Shield the minimum strength required to prevent "conquest by surprise". Unfortunately, however, there are two flaws in the program for the protection of Europe against such an attack or in its presentation, which rob it of its appeal to the Continent.

One of these flaws has to do with the idea of a "warning period" which we are repeatedly told a strong Shield would offer the West, and to which Churchill, for instance, attached "greatest importance".¹³ If the Shield is strong, it is argued, the Soviets would not dare launch an attack merely with the forces available in or around East Germany. Instead, they would be forced to bring up more divisions from Satellite and even perhaps from Soviet territory. Such a movement of troops could not remain undetected. The West would be warned, therefore, that an aggressive step--in fact, a very substantial or massive attack on Europe--was in the making. The risk of a surprise attack would be eliminated.

However, both for NATO and for Europe it only makes sense to attach importance to the warning period which a strong Shield would assure if the West can use such a period advantageously. If the Soviets started moving up toward the Iron Curtain the tens of divisions readily available to them in the rear of their East German position, what courses of action would be open to the West? The idea that America's nuclear striking power would go into action once such a movement were detected can be discarded. If the United States were prepared to engage in what would represent a preventive first-strike blow at the Soviet Union, there would be no reason to wait for peace-time Soviet "redeployment moves". Moreover, it is hard to believe that the United States would put SAC into action as long as there remained even the remotest chance that it would not have to be used. As another possibility, the build-up of Soviet forces near the Iron Curtain could help alert the Strategic Air Command. However, one must trust that its readiness for action is not contingent upon such a special warning. One way in which the warning period could be of substantial help, though only theoretically, would be by giving NATO time to match the Soviet build-up by mobilizing and moving into position reserve divisions of its own, sufficient in strength to enable the Shield to ward off an attack by as many divisions, a conceivably in the hundreds, as the Soviets might be assembling. But the fact is that adequate reserves are not available for this purpose today, and Europe certainly is in no mood to engage in an effort to make trained reserves available that could even remotely measure up to such a task. It follows, therefore, that the warning period which a stronger Shield could provide is of little military value to the West.

If the Shield is to be strengthened by means of additional European efforts, the line of argument needs to be changed. The problem is whether the Shield can perform a function, other than to provide a warning period, with respect to an attack that the Soviets did not intend as part of an initiation of total war. Fortunately, if the Soviets wish to keep the war limited, the chances are almost nil

71

[LC]

that they would first substantially increase the forces readily available to them in and around Eastern Europe in order to be able to launch an attack with more powerful armies. No Soviet government in its right senses would dare throw mass armies across the Iron Curtain unless it were out to engage in total war, in which case it would first attempt to knock out America's strategic nuclear striking power. Failure to do so would give the United States ample reason and opportunity to put in a first-strike nuclear blow, the only kind of strike that might put Soviet military power out of commission for all practical purposes. The Sword, then, serves to place a ceiling on the Soviet forces that the Shield is called upon to deter or if deterr-ence fails, to stop from overrunning Europe in a limited war. For its part, the Shield has the function of robbing the Soviets of any temptation or chance of penetrating deeply into West Germany or any other part of Western Europe by a surprise attack carried out with forces so small that their attack would not, in Soviet opinion, trigger an American strategic retaliatory blow. For this purpose, a NATO Shield of thirty divisions would seem ample--though not excessive in view of the length of the front to be covered. Such a Shield, then, would place before the Kremlin the choice of either desisting from any attack on Europe or of undertaking it with forces so large that the risk of provoking massive American retaliation would become almost prohibitive.

Here, then, is a task that should appeal to Europe. It suggests a mission manageable without enormous increases in the strength of the Shield and one that does not envisage an effort to defend Europe against a dreaded Soviet "steamroller" of a hundred or more divisions. But the sense of futility in the face of the latter kind of mission for the Shield has not been the only psychological hurdle in the way of European interest in a larger Shield. There is a second hurdle that points to another flaw in the doctrine, one, by the way, for which Europe itself bears much of the responsibility. By a vicious circle, the European lack of interest in a powerful Shield has led NATO to adopt a doctrine that in turn discourages additional European efforts.

Because it was found impossible to obtain from the European members of NATO anything like the number of divisions planned at Lisbon, the decision was reached in 1953 to substitute tactical atomic weapons for manpower. As General Norstad explained in 1956,¹⁴ the 1951 NATO plan had already cut down requirements from ninety to sixty-five divisions, but the 1953 figure had to be cut again, this time to less than one-half of the 1951 plan. These cuts, he declared, made it necessary to shift to tactical nuclear weapons. From that time on, according to General Norstad, it became NATO doctrine to plan operations in Europe on the assumption of "full and prompt" use of atomic weapons "in the case of any major attack in which the defense of Europe was at stake". The consequences of this decision are only gradually dawning on the European public, though Operation Carte Blanche, maneuvers in which several million Germans were assumed killed by tactical nuclear bombs, provided an early warning of what was envisaged for Europe.

One can understand the appeal of the idea of substituting atomic weapons for massed manpower, costly both on terms of money and of painful years of required service. So alluring was the idea, in fact, that Europeans, by and large, closed their minds to the full implications of the shift for the "battlefield countries". A Shield equipped with atomic weapons did not appear frightening as long as the public was led to believe either that such weapons would remain a monopoly of the West, or that their advantage to the defensive side was overwhelming. Today faith in any advantages to Western Europe that could compensate for the destructive effects of two way tactical nuclear warfare is rapidly vanishing if it continues to exist at all.¹⁵

72

[LC]

Tactical atomic weapons are necessary for the Shield forces but for a different purpose than originally and currently envisaged by the NATO planners. If Soviet forces are hurled against Europe in a surprise attack not intended to lead to total war--the only kind of attack that is of direct and exclusive concern to the Shield if my earlier assertions are correct--a defense equipped with both strategic and tactical nuclear weapons is in an excellent position to deter the Soviets from initiating the use of nuclear weapons. If they did, they would not only risk stepping up the attack above the permissible level of provocation--thereby giving the United States an opening for a devastating first-strike nuclear blow--but they would also have to count on the certainty of tactical nuclear retaliation. It is up to NATO, therefore, as has been assumed in NATO plans, to decide whether to turn what might otherwise remain a conventional war into a tactical nuclear war. Nothing else can be meant by "prompt use" of the new weapons.

The NATO decision to opt for a tactical nuclear war in Europe is nothing short of amazing, and not only from the point of view of European interests. It has certainly had the result of rendering the idea of a strong Shield more distasteful to Europe. If the Soviets have reason to hesitate in initiating the use of nuclear weapons for fear of provoking first-strike strategic nuclear retaliation, one would think that the same danger in reverse should be operative in preventing NATO from taking the initiative. But for Europe, moreover, a tactical nuclear war--unless it can be severely and reliably limited to very small warheads and kept away from population centers--comes close to being a total war.¹⁶ As a matter of fact, Europeans are inclined to fear such a war even more than a total war on the grounds that Europe would suffer no less damage but would have to fight without hope that strategic nuclear blows at the Soviet Union might quickly break the back of the attacking Soviet ground forces.¹⁷

It will be argued that in view of the weakness of the Shield in conventional forces, NATO has no other choice but to rely on nuclear firepower. This may be true as things stand today. But I believe Europe would provide the necessary conventional forces if it were made clear that by doing so it would have a fair chance of saving itself from nuclear devastation. Although the Shield should be stronger than it is today, it would only have to be strong enough to deter or stop a medium-sized Soviet army of, pessimistically speaking, twenty to perhaps fifty divisions and one that would be limited to the use of conventional weapons. What Europe is asked to do for its own defense, then, is to help establish a Shield of about thirty front-line divisions, double-purpose forces capable also of tactical nuclear warfare, not because they are intended to use nuclear weapons, but on the contrary, because their atomic capabilities may deter the Soviets from using such weapons. It is hard to believe that a Shield of the size and quality needed to fulfill such a not-so-modest but also not-very-ambitious task would strike Europeans as being beyond Europe's capacity once it were realized that its availability might spell European survival in the most literal sense of the term.

One has not necessarily exhausted the middle-range tasks of the Shield by pointing to its role in a limited war. While I have said that I see no significant role for the Shield in the initial stages of a total war, at least none that would not be reprehensible to Continental countries, one need not conclude a priori that the Shield should leave total war entirely to the Sword. As the 1954 British Defense White Paper put it, one may also have to think of a period of "broken-back warfare" that would follow the opening phase of a total war.¹⁸ Developments in the later stages of a total war might be of greatest importance to European countries

73

[L:C]

Obviously, if the United States were knocked out by an early onslaught of Soviet strategic bombers and missiles while the Soviet Union retained much of its fighting power, Shield forces, however, strong and courageous, could render little service to Europe or to what was left of Europe. Soviet occupation and domination of the Continent for an indeterminate period would be in store for Europe. But there are other contingencies. The Soviet Union alone might be knocked out; but if this happened there would be no need for more than cleaning up operations by Shield forces. Or, as a third possibility, both the United States and the Soviet Union might exhaust their nuclear striking power in the initial stages of the war without bringing the war to a close and without losing all of their fighting capacity. In such a case, a broken-back phase would follow in which the major operations in Europe would be likely to fall to the ground forces in Europe of both the NATO Shield and the Soviets. Shield forces that had survived in fighting condition might then be able to liberate Europe even against great odds, particularly if the war had been conducted by the West in a way that would maximize nuclear damage to the Soviet arsenal while minimizing the damage to Europe.

Only military experts can estimate the types and size of forces that would best be suited and adequate for tasks the Shield would be expected to tackle in the broken-back stage of a total war. One can say, however, that it would be nothing short of a curious and happy coincidence if the forces currently set on foot for operations in either limited wars or during the initial stage of a total war happened to be equally fit to carry out missions in the late phase of such a war. It might be difficult, for instance, to keep conscript armies in adequate fighting condition while their homelands were being laid in ashes by all-out nuclear bombardment. Or it might be necessary to think in terms of forces particularly suited to guerilla operations or capable of escaping rapidly and well supplied into tenable positions away from the invasion routes. These are pure speculations, but whatever the type and strength of the forces needed, one might expect Europe to be ready to make a major contribution if it could feel assured that such forces might help make large scale invasion even more unattractive than it already is to a Soviet Union determined to wage a total war, and that such forces would make more likely an early end to an invasion if it were to take place.

VI

One is led to the conclusion that, given the necessary changes in NATO strategy and tactics, the present European reluctance to make larger contributions to the Shield could be overcome. Europe has no less of an interest than the United States in making NATO a pact of mutual military assistance rather than a guarantee pact which would place Europe's security at the mercy either of deterrence by the American strategic nuclear Sword or of defense through total war. But Europe is likely to remain disinterested in the Shield as long as a strong Shield appears, in case of total war, to be destined to throw itself in the path of a Soviet steam-roller or, in case of limited war, to turn a conventional Soviet attack into a nuclear war of catastrophic consequences for the "battlefield countries". A change in European attitudes could be expected, however, if it were decided, and made clear, that a stronger Shield was needed for no other purpose than to prevent or defeat a relatively moderate Soviet surprise attack on any part of Western Europe, and to deter the Soviets from resorting to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in case they should launch such an attack. The future of NATO may well hinge on the willingness and ability of its leaders to change their strategic doctrine and its implementation before erosion of the alliance has reached a point of no return.

74

[LC]

NOTES

1. Ruth C. Lawson, "Concerting Policies in the North Atlantic Community", *International Organization*, XII, no. 2, Spring 1958, pp. 163-179.

2. General Lauris Norstad, speech at Cincinnati, November 12, 1957, Text in *NATO Letter*, V, no. 12, December 1957, pp. 26-28.

3. *The Economist*, CLXXXI, no. 5913, December 22, 1956, pp. 1057-1058.

4. Cf. a forthcoming paper on NATO strategies by Roger Hilsman to be presented at a January 1959 conference on NATO at Princeton University.

5. General Lauris Norstad, "NATO--Deterrent and Shield", address to the American Council on NATO, New York, January 29, 1957; text in *NATO Letter*, V, no. 2, February 1957, pp. 27-30.

6. *Bundestag Record*, February 25, 1955, p. 3736. Cf. Hans Speier, *German Rearmament and Atomic War* (Row, Peterson and Co., White Plains, N. Y., 1957). p. 168.

7. Even if defensive forces of half the strength of the attacker might prove effective eventually, it does not mean they could stop him on the line of attack. It has been suggested that the Shield could do so by means of atomic interdiction, thereby to cut off the Soviet armies at the front from their supplies and reinforcements. One wonders, however, how much advantage the NATO defenders would gain from such tactics if the Soviets reciprocated with the same kind of atomic interdiction. Presumably they would be in as good a position as NATO to pile up near the front whatever supplies the fighting forces would need to advance.

8. Malcolm Hoag, "NATO: Deterrent or Shield", *Foreign Affairs*, XXXVI, no. 2, January 1958, p. 284.

9. General Matthew B. Ridgway, SACEUR, *Second Annual Report to the Standing Group NATO*, 30 May 1953.

10. Speech in the House of Commons on defense policy, March 1, 1955, text in *U. S. News and World Report*, XXXVIII, no. 10, March 11, 1955, pp. 74-78.

11. Arnold Wolfers, "Could a War in Europe be Limited", *Yale Review*, XLV, no. 2, *Winter 1956*, pp. 214-228.

12. See, for instance, Ferdinand Otto Miksche, *Der Atomkrieg Findet Nicht Statt*, Friedrich Vorwerk Verlag, Stuttgart, 1958.

75

13. See Churchill's comments on the Defense White Paper of 1954, H.C. Debates, vol. 524; 2 March 1954, cols. 1135-1136.

14. "Interview with General Lauris Norstad", NATO Letter, IV, no. 12, December 1, 1956, pp. 34-37.

15. The idea that with its tactical nuclear weapons NATO could interdict the Soviets from reinforcing their armies at the front and thereby gain a great defensive advantage is not likely to make limited nuclear war more palatable to Continentals. There is nothing to prevent the Soviets from matching the destruction wrought through interdictory bombardment by NATO of a zone in East Germany and Poland by applying the same treatment to a zone across Western Europe for the same purpose of interdiction.

16. For critical examination of the argument that this would be the nature of a limited nuclear war in Europe, see James E. King, Jr. "Limited Annihilation" (Part II of a review of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy by Henry A. Kissinger) in the New Republic for July 15, 1957.

17. Kaufmann arguing against Kissinger about limited nuclear war states that "we must also anticipate that rather few countries will volunteer to be defended by these means". William W. Kaufmann, "The Crisis in Military Affairs" in World Politics, vol. X, no. 4, July 1958, pp. 579-603.

18. Statement on Defence, 1954. Cmd. 9075 (February 1954)

which would probably suffer invasion in the initial phases. Little mention of such a phase has been made in NATO pronouncements.¹⁹

19. See, however, Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, "The Panorama of Warfare in a Nuclear Age", The Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, CI, no. 604, November 1956, pp. 503-520.

[LC]

76

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

**Roger Hilsman**
Deputy Chief, Legislative
Reference Service of the Library
of Congress; Research Associate
of the Center

**James E. King, Jr.**
Research Associate of the Center;
formerly military operations
analyst, the Operations Research
Office of The Johns Hopkins
University

**Paul Nitze**
Chairman, Executive Committee
and Research Associate of the
Center; President of the Foreign
Service Educational Foundation

**Arnold Wolfers**
Director and Research Associate
of the Center; Sterling Professor
Emeritus of International Relations,
Yale University

[LC]

77