- 14 -

State Department is not the right vehicle because all too often
the State Department tends to confuse diplomacy with foreign
policy. Only in the White House is it possible to generate the
necessary broad, interagency approach to long-term planning.
Hence, within the NSC, a top-level, civil-military geostrategic
planning staff should be created to formulate and periodically
revise the broad outlines of a long-term policy. U.S. policy is
likely to become infused with the requisite longer-term geostra-
tegic content only if the top decision makers or their immediate
deputies are engaged in this undertaking, only if periodically
the president himself is involved, and only if regular consulta-
tions are held with appropriate congressional leaders.

Thank you.

- 15 -

# APPENDIX:

## CHECKLIST OF THE PRINCIPAL POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE PROPOSED LONG-TERM STRATEGY

1. The objective of U.S. policy on the strategic level must be Mutual Strategic Security.

2. U.S. strategic offensive forces must be modernized, but their configuration and numbers should be contrived not to pose a threat of a disarming first strike to Soviet strategic forces.

3. The United States should deploy a limited strategic defense of its strategic forces and command and control systems.

4. The United States should undertake a gradual -- and certainly only partial -- reduction in the level of American forces in Europe.

5. Budgetary savings from these reductions should be allocated to a significant expansion of U.S. airlift capability. Manpower withdrawn from Europe should be absorbed into an enlarged Rapid Deployment Force.

6. Japan should be encouraged not to increase its defense spending greatly, but rather to increase its economic assistance to developing countries in which Japan shares a security interest with the other industrialized democracies.

7. The United States must step up the political and military pressure on the Soviet Union on the issue of Afghanistan.

8. The United States should also advance a diplomatic formula that calls for the external neutralization and the internal self-determination of Afghanistan.

9. The United States must seek to reinforce the resilience of Iran and Pakistan to Soviet advances where possible.

10. The United States should promote the development of an independent-minded and increasingly assertive East European public opinion.

11. The United States should seek to give sharper political definition to the trends toward self-assertion among the non-Russian nations of the Soviet Union. The real opportunity exists to mobilize the forces for genuine political participation, for greater national codetermination, for the dispersal of central power, and for the termination of heavy-handed central domination that breeds the expansionist impulse.

- 16 -

12. The United States should formally propose a schedule for ministerial-level meetings with the Soviet Union to move forward U.S.-Soviet negotiations during the remainder of the Reagan administration.

13. The United States should in the course of the next two years seek a five-year interim strategic arms control agreement that provides for serious reductions in the overall arsenals of the two sides.

14. The United States must make a major public issue of Soviet strategic secrecy and insist that the Soviet veil of secrecy be lifted for the sake of mutual strategic security.

15. The United States should propose a wider set of negotiations, involving proportional reductions in the strategic and conventional forces of both sides.

16. The United States should indicate a willingness to resolve the crisis in Nicaragua on the basis of the same formula as Afghanistan, external neutralization and internal self-determination.

17. Within the NSC, a top-level, civil-military geostrategic planning staff should be created to formulate and periodically revise the broad outlines of a long-term policy.

POLICY

THE UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

WASHINGTON, D.C. 20301

23 DEC 1986

DEC 23 1986

Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
1800 K Street, N.W.
Suite 1021
Washington, D.C. 20006

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

Please excuse the error in our letter of
12 December 1986 appointing you as a member of
the Advisory Committee on Integrated Long-Term
Strategy. The typing discs got crossed for five
of the letters, with the result that you and
four other members were noted as a Co-Chairman,
when in fact Dr. Ikle and Professor Wohlstetter
are the Co-Chairmen.

Again, my sincere apologies for this error.
If possible, have your secretary return the incor-
rect letter. I enclose a correct one.

Attachment:
Corrected Appointment Letter

THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
WASHINGTON, THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

12 DEC 1986

Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
1800 K Street, N.W.
Suite 1021
Washington, DC 20006

DEC 17 1986

Dear Henry:

We have been in touch with you regarding the Advisory Committee on Integrated Long-Term Strategy. Now that all the required forms have been filled out, it is my pleasure to appoint you formally as Co-Chairman for the duration of the Committee's tenure. This Committee of distinguished private citizens and public servants will provide advice to me and to the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

I am gratified that you have agreed to accept this appointment. Please accept in advance my thanks and Frank Carlucci's for your willingness to devote your time and energies to assisting the nation.

COMMISSION ON INTEGRATED LONG-TERM STRATEGY

WASHINGTON, D.C. 20301-2000
(202) 697-8360

Department of Defense "Task Force"
on Integrated Long-Term Strategy*

Executive Director: James J. Martin
Science Applications International Corp.
La Jolla, CA 92038 (619) 456-6297

Coordinating role and research support:
Institute for Defense Analysis

Working Groups (as of 25 Nov; others may be added):

**Chairman**

1. Future Security Environment and Soviet Union: Andrew Marshall and Charles Wolf
2. Regional Conflicts: Paul Gorman
3. Technology:
    - Subpanel on C³I: Charles Herzfeld
    - Robert Hermann
4. Offensive and Defensive Forces: Henry Rowen and Fred Hoffman

Some Separate Studies Started So Far:

**Lead**

1. Trends in military exercises:
    a. US and NATO: IDA and Intel. Community
    b. Soviet: IDA and DoD (PA&E)
2. Trends in forces, logistics and armaments: US, Soviet Union, allies: IDA and DoD (PA&E)
3. Soviet power projection: trends: DIA
4. Proliferation of Chemical Weapons: DoD (AE) and Intel. Community
5. Military Innovation and Acquisition: US and Soviet: Rand
6. Performance of US national emergency communications system in wartime: DoD (DCA) and National Academy of Science
7. Review of past major US Government studies of US national security strategy: DoD (Historian) and NSC

28/11/86

*This "task force" is supportive of but separate from the Commission.

April 28, 1987

Albert Wohlstetter

Corrected: May 8,1987

F.O.U.O.

OUTLINE: TALK APRIL 30
ROLE OF PRECISION & DISCRIMINATION
IN NUCLEAR WAR IN EUROPE

Each side has various options

- to destroy military targets (in the Soviet case to aid a combined arms invasion, in our case to defeat it)

And in destroying military targets

- to reduce collateral harm to bystanders in order to give its adversary a stake in restraint

- or to neglect or to increase collateral harm

- or directly to attack bystanders

ILS work is examining

1. Comprehensive and indiscriminate Soviet military attacks neglecting or increasing collateral damage

2. Soviet direct attacks on cities

3. Soviet selective and effective discriminate attacks on key obstacles to an invasion and key facilities for nuclear response while maximizing our incentives for responding selectively, and

4. Our options in each of the preceding cases

(a) for prompt comprehensive indiscriminate response against military targets

(b) for direct attacks on bystanders

(c) for effective attacks on military targets made selectively and discriminately to keep destruction under control

1

5. One standard Western view:

- if Soviets use nuclear weapons at all they would do so

(a) so comprehensively and indiscriminately as to kill
nearly as many bystanders as a direct attack on cities

(b) the attack on military targets would not be so effective as to preclude our *ability* to respond with nuclear weapons

(c) the collateral harm caused by their attack would be
so extensive as to give us no *reason not to respond*
with prompt comprehensive and indiscriminate
destruction

(d) the resulting mutual destruction would be so extensive that the Soviets, anticipating this sequence of events, are most unlikely to attack at all

6. Minor variations of this view include those that hold that such a sequence of attacks might follow shortly after initial non-nuclear or selective nuclear exchanges, but with the same apocalyptic outcome almost certain.

7. Dove and hawk variants of this view. On the dove side, Frank von Hippel et al of Princeton have done extensive calculations illustrating this for Europe and for the United States. On the hawk side, it has been the theory underlying the use of the French force de frappe as a last resort in a "dying sting" on Soviet cities.

8. Today, I will present a few results on Europe only and focus on Soviet alternatives.

2

CHART 1: Fallout in the Two Germanies

A. Illustrates a popular image of nuclear war in the center of Europe -- the same smoking, radiating ruin pictured both by political leaders as well as their anti-nuclear opposition.

B. 200-kt ground bursts on 171 military targets in both Germanies

C. However:

(1) the attack on East Germany neglects NATO restraints on yields and height of burst, etc.

(2) West Germany has no super-hard facilities, very few semi-hard and none that even with *current* Soviet accuracies require ground bursts (or airbursts of such large yield) to achieve Soviet invasion goals.

(3) such an attack would destroy many of the assets whose take-over may have motivated the Soviet attack and whose preservation Soviet military writings have stressed as a useful wartime objective.

(4) such an attack would present serious obstacles to planned advance of Soviet troops through West Germany (as is noted in Soviet military writings).

(5) prevailing winds would carry fallout into the Warsaw Pact

(6) this (and similar attacks on other NATO countries) would leave West Germany (and other NATO countries) little incentive for opting out or exercising restraint and so would involve great risks that the conflict would get out of control.

3

(7) Even a less loaded big laydown, nominally against military targets in Western Europe using:
* 800 nuclear weapons
* with yield in 100's of kiloton range
* attacking only 40 or so hard targets
* with about 80 surface or near surface bursts
would not kill many people with fall-out,
but would kill about 54 million counting fire effects

(8) Soviets have options worth examining that might divide Allies and get key ones to opt out which threaten the Center but actually attack a weak flank or a critical area outside NATO bounds, like the Persian Gulf.

(9) Even in the NATO center, the Soviets would be able to attack with increasing precision, selectively and discriminately:
* MOBs,
* POMCUS sets,
* $C^3_I$,
* Nuclear assets
with substantial military effect as an increment to their conventional combined arms invasion
- and small enough collateral harm to leave NATO countries a large stake in responding non-suicidally if at all.

4

CHART 2: <u>Bitburg: Military Effects</u>

A. Two ways of attacking an important F-15 base.

B. The Bitburg base boundary is the outermost black line.

C. The balloon-like part of the outline is the base housing
annex which abuts town of Bitburg.

D. Hatched areas are for aircraft parking.

E. On long thin rectangle parallel and near center of runways are aircraft parked in the open.

F. Aircraft in hangerattes in irregular hatched area at right.

G. QRA craft on the left.

H. The large red circle shows the radius (nearly 5 km) at which a 200-kt ground burst would destroy aircraft in or out of hangarettes.

I. The small red circles show the radius (a bit over 400 m) at which four I-kt airbursts would do the same thing, but with very different collateral effects.

5

CHART 3: <u>Bitburg: Collateral Effects</u> (Prompt)

A. This chart shows effects on population.

B. The resident population is shown in the dark hatched circles, each of which contains 95% of those in a population center (which varies from a town to a small hamlet. These are not to scale.)

- The largest at the upper left is Bitburg itself with about 10,000 population.

- The small circle nearest the runway represents a hamlet with fewer than 75 people.

C. The red circles represent the radii at which persons in a wood frame single-story structure would have a 5% chance of being killed by prompt radiation, blast or thermal effects (say in a nighttime attack).

D. The large 200-kt circle (nearly 5 km in radius) includes a substantial part of Bitburg as well as many small villages and hamlets would result in 1900 fatalities if everyone were indoors. The lethal radius would be substantially larger against people outdoors. And the 200-kt attack would then kill promptly c. 5500.

E. The small 1-kt circle merge since they have slightly more than a km radius for a 1 in 20 chance of fatality. They don't reach any of the hamlets or villages, or even the on-base housing and are a long way from Bitburg.

6

F. Qualifications:

- This is a nighttime attack on a resident population at home in or out of doors (though in the case of the 1-kt attack the result would change very little if people in the hamlets were out of doors).

- Some military personnel would be on base near aircraft runways even at night. In daytime more.

- Nonetheless, the contrast is clear. Substantial fatalities from the 200-kt ground burst. Very low collateral damage from the 1-kt attack.

- And the contrast would be even larger if we considered the 64 square miles which the 200-kt ground burst would cover with a long ellipse of fall-out accumulating to 600 rads in 1 week. This is suggested in Chart 4.

CHART 4: <u>Bitburg: Fall-out</u>

CHART 5: <u>15 USAFE Bases</u> (Not shown April 30th)

A. If one looks at all 15 USAFE bases, they vary in proximity to population. The worst being Ramstein. (Where 1-kt airbursts would kill c. 1600 all indoors, or c. 1900 all outdoors.) Average of all 15 is c.300, Median c.100

B. The military importance -- large

- all F-15s on _______ bases

- all Wild Weasels on _______ bases

7

CHART 6: <u>Strasbourg-Entzheim</u>

A. Pierre Gallois, the moving spirit behind the French force de frappe, has made a series of similar calculations and shown them on viewgraphs indicating that in the age of precision the French can no longer count on the Soviets being forced to do France great collateral harm while destroying key military targets.

B. Gallois' viewgraph of the Strasbourg/Entzheim airbase shows the radius of destruction against aircraft assuming quite high blast resistance (21 psi, more than double the usual American estimate) and two collateral damage levels:

- one at 5 psi which is quite close to the damage radius we use for a 50/50 chance of fatalities from prompt radiation, the dominant effect at low yields

- and a 1 psi circle as an extreme outer limit for very modest non-lethal damage

C. Gallois' viewgraph is a little complicated. It illustrates the effect of various median inaccuracies in aiming (the small black circles show the aim points for each of the 4 weapons, the small triangles show the weapon landing 150m away from the aimpoint.

8

D. His conclusion is much the same as ours, however, 1-kt weapon airbursts would have a high probability of destroying the aircraft and would do very little collateral damage.

E. The next viewgraph, also from Gallois, shows the vulnerability of the entire French tactical airforce. The airbases are outlined in black, the circles show the area at which 1 psi modest collateral damage might reach.

F. 18 MRBMs and 2 LCCCs on Plateau D'Albion (S.E. France). An accurate 1-kt E.P.W. would have a high Pd with collateral damage limited to 1-km against a 2000 psi silo, like ours. If French silos are like our earlier ones, 300 psi, they could be destroyed with an even smaller radius of collateral damage. But not many people live within 1 km of a silo in any case.

9

CONCLUSIONS

(1) I stress Soviet potential use of nuclear weapons as an addition to a conventional force which already has a substantial advantage. They may not need it.
(We have asked RAND to look at non-nuclear and chemical attacks on the same NATO targets.)
Why bother then?

(2) Because if we improve, as we should, our conventional forces, in active and passive defense and precise long-range offense, the Soviets might use a *nuclear* increment to their force, and then our improvements in conventional forces are unlikely to be enough to deter or reply to a selective nuclear attack. Or they might use nuclear weapons to overcome some unexpected obstacles.

(3) We usually think of NATO using nuclear weapons to offset a Soviet conventional advantage. The Soviets might use nuclear weapons first if they don't have that advantage.

(4) Conventional force improvements are important, but not enough. Need to deter Soviet selective use of nuclear weapons in W. Eur.

(5) For this purpose, one needs a selective, non-suicidal nuclear response.

10

# Swords without Shields

—Albert Wohlstetter

ANTAGONISTS have usually found it handy to have both offenses and defenses—means of striking blows and ways of parrying them.

Knights carried swords into battle, not only shields and suits of armor. Tanks deploy armor as well as armor-piercing guns. Fighter aircraft use guns or air-to-air missiles and shielded cockpits and self-sealing fuel tanks. And countries that at some uncertain future date just might consider starting a war to revise the status quo generally have wanted some shield against the remnants of their victim's offensive force which might survive their own initial attack.

So also for countries preparing to resist aggression. They generally want the capability both to counterattack and to protect themselves against their adversary's initial and continuing assaults; and they want such protection to extend both to their military means for attacking and defending and (however imperfectly) to some important elements of their civil society and political order.

The exact mixture of offense and defense will vary with the political and military objectives and circumstances of the two sides and with the changing state of the arts of offense and defense. But the need for both

seems to apply at any state of the art—even to combat with bare hands. Boxers with a roundhouse punch and a glass jaw may never get to use their punch; and those prepared to absorb a great deal of punishment but not to dish it out may end up only absorbing punishment. Neither a pure offense nor a pure defense is an unmixed blessing.

## Offense, Defense, and Arms Control

DISARMAMENT negotiators for the democracies between the two world wars were interested in staving off another war and therefore found it natural to seek agreements to limit offensive weapons in particular and even to eliminate them. Some weapons, such as short-range antiaircraft guns, have as their only purpose stopping a weapon carrier already on its way to target. A country that had only weapons effective against other weapons already launched against it could hardly start a war. And if no country had anything but such weapons, the reasoning went, no country could start a war.

The actual weapons available between the wars, however, did not fall so neatly into categories of pure defense and pure offense. For instance, the victim of an assault might use strike aircraft to launch a counterassault, or the aggressor might use defensive weapons to blunt the victim's counterassault. And some countries engaged in arms negotiations also contemplated using arms to extend their borders. Disarmament negotiators bogged down in a welter of ambiguities and confu-

Albert Wohlstetter is director of research at Pan Heuristics. This article is based on a chapter in the forthcoming *Swords and Shields: NATO, the USSR, and New Choices for Long-Range Defense and Defense*, to be published by Lexington Books.

The National Interest—Summer 1987

31

sion on the subject of such qualitative disar-
mament. Winston Churchill, as might be
expected, made the essential point with dev-
estating wit:

The Foreign Secretary told us that it was
difficult to divide weapons into offensive and
defensive categories. It certainly is, because
almost every conceivable weapon may be used
in defence or offence; either by an aggressor or
by the innocent victim of his assault. To make
it more difficult for the invader, heavy guns,
tanks, and poison gas are to be relegated to the
evil category of offensive weapons. The inva-
sion of France by Germany in 1914 reached its
climax without the employment of any of these
weapons. The heavy gun is to be described as
"an offensive weapon." It is all right in a
fortress; there it is virtuous and pacific in its
character; but bring it out into the field—and,
of course, if it were needed, it would be
brought out into the field—and it immediately
becomes naughty, peccant, militaristic, and has
to be placed under the ban of civilisation. Take
the tank. The Germans, having invaded
France, entrenched themselves; and in a couple
of years they shot down 1,500,000 French and
British soldiers who were trying to free the soil
of France. The tank was invented to overcome
the fire of the machine-guns with which the
Germans were maintaining themselves in
France, and it saved a lot of lives in clearing the
soil of the invader. Now, apparently, the ma-
chine-gun, which was the German weapon for
holding on to thirteen provinces of France, is to
be the virtuous, defensive machine-gun, and
the tank, which was the means by which these
Allied lives were saved, is to be placed under
the censure and obloquy of all just and right-
eous men.¹

He added prophetically that the governments
at Geneva would be better off trying to ban
weapons that tended to kill and wound not
only combatants but also men, women, and
children far removed from areas of conflict.

Churchill challenged not only the clarity
of the distinction between offense and de-
fense and its applicability to actual weapons
but the political assumption implicit in the
British negotiating stance: that the Third

Reich (or indeed its immediate predecessor)
threatened the French Third Republic no
more than the reverse and was no more likely
to start a war to change the status quo. Hitler
spoke, with greater eloquence than most re-
member, about the unfairness of the arms
arrangements in the Versailles Treaty and
about his own desire for peace as well as
justice. As Alan Bullock's excellent book de-
tails, Hitler struck a responsive chord among
the British public and the British political
elite, both left and right.² But Churchill was
much less susceptible even to plausible argu-
ments for equality in arms that relied on the
implied belief that reducing French superiori-
ity in military force would lessen the proba-
bility of war in the 1930s:

I should very much regret to see any approxi-
mation in military strength between Germany
and France. Those who speak of that as though
it were right, or even a question of fair dealing,
altogether underrate the gravity of the Euro-
pean situation. I would say to those who would
like to see Germany and France on an equal
footing in armaments: "Do you wish for war?"
For my part, I earnestly hope that no such
approximation will take place during my life-
time or that of my children. To say that is not
in the least to imply any want of regard or
admiration for the great qualities of the Ger-
man people, but I am sure that the thesis that
they should be placed in an equal military
position with France is one which, if it ever
emerged in fact, would bring us within practi-
cal distance of almost measureless calamity.¹

Democratic leaders and their publics,
rather more than the dictators with whom
they negotiate, tend to worry about fairness,
about their own power exceeding that of
potential adversaries, and about provoking
adversary fears of being attacked. Since
World War II, political elites among the
democracies have often thought of reassuring
potential adversaries, including the Soviets,
by arguing that their military forces are
purely defensive or by proposing programs
for making them purely defensive and inca-
pable of launching an attack. In Article IX of

32

I

their constitution, the Japanese formally gave
up the right to use any military force. As
reality impinged, they modified the meaning
of the doctrine, coming to interpret it as
allowing military force that could repel attack
on Japan but not military force that they
could use to attack others. They call their
defense department the Self-Defense Agency
to make explicit its purely defensive charac-
ter. For many years they severely limited the
range of their fighters to make clear that they
could not attack the Asian mainland, and
they even constrained navigation and guid-
ance to make sure that even if fighters could
reach their targets, they couldn't find them.

Japan adopted its constitution, with the
help of that famous pacifist General
MacArthur, at a time when its neighbors
wanted a good deal of reassuring that they
would never again have to worry about an
expanding Japan. Now, forty-five years after
Pearl Harbor, the dangers of Japanese aggres-
sion look rather remote. The Soviets, above
all, have little to worry about in that respect.
But even U.S. allies in Nato, some of whom
for over a century have been only the objects
of aggression and have hardly even a far-
fetched motive or significant capacity for
attacking the Soviet Union, feel it necessary
to reassure the Soviets that they are not going
to attack them.

The Norwegians keep 800 kilometers by
road away from their short Arctic border
with the Soviet Union when exercising with
allied military forces, and even when training
their own national troops announce all ma-
neuvers involving 10,000 or more—far below
the Helsinki threshold of 25,000—in order to
reassure the Soviets that they are unlikely to
pounce on them, and they recently refused
the United States permission to use F-111s in
a joint exercise on the defense of Norway, for
fear of provoking the Soviets. Nato leaders in
general are at pains to reassure Soviet leaders
and their own publics that Nato is a purely
defensive alliance. The Supreme Allied Com-
mander of Nato, General Bernard Rogers,
made clear in November 1984 that even in the
event of a massive Soviet invasion, Nato

would attack Soviet follow-on second-eche-
ton forces but would not move large Nato
forces across the border (as U.S. and British
forces moved into Germany near the end of
Word War II). He added that, at most, if it
were necessary to restore the "integrity of
Nato territory," it was "conceivable" that
Nato might, for that limited and temporary
purpose, operate a "few kilometers" across
the border. That was enough to cause a
storm. The conservative West German de-
fense minister, a notably sober and thought-
ful man, immediately responded that "there
are no plans for Nato ground forces to ad-
vance onto Warsaw Pact territory over the
GDR border in the event of hostilities"; the
attacker would be deterred by the risk that his
country could be destroyed—that is, by the
bombing of targets in his cities.⁴

More recently, proposals whose main
purpose is to reduce the "Nato threat" to the
Soviets have been cropping up among various
less sober factions in Nato countries. Some
would, like the Japanese, try to get rid of
aircraft capable of bombarding the other side.
They would equip their F-16s with air-to-air
but not air-to-surface missiles. Tanks would
have to go, too, since they could be used
offensively as well as defensively. Anders
Böserup, a Danish foreign policy analyst,
would weaken further the already feeble
Danish defense in this way. The Danish
Social Democrats in July 1986 formally
adopted the idea. They propose to withdraw
one of their three brigades in Germany to
Denmark, restrict the Danish Navy to sur-
veillance and mine sweeping, and retain
coastal missiles to defend against attacking
ships. Further, they call for reinforcements
sent to Denmark by its Nato allies to operate
only well inside Denmark and to abandon the
forward defense strategy—again, so as not to
frighten the panicky Soviets.⁵ If a sober West
German defense minister envisages stopping
the German combined arms counterattack at
the border, the Danish Social Democrats
would not go even that far. They want to
operate against invaders only well within
Danish territory.

Swords without Shields 33

The official policy of the West German Social Democratic party, adopted in May 1984, is to dispense with tanks and fighter bombers and to reorganize the Bundeswehr to give it a "structural inability to attack."6 Pushed by men like Andreas von Bülow, a former junior defense minister in the Schmidt government, old ideas that flowered at the end of the 1950s about defense by a people's militia flourish once more. They call for resisting Soviet attack, but in a way more like the guerrilla resistance offered by the Yugoslav partisans.

The British Labour party now officially calls for a non-nuclear military force. They would abandon British strategic and tactical nuclear weapons and would call also for the removal of all U.S. nuclear forces in England. It is now frequently remarked that such Europeans do not think that there is much of a Soviet nuclear threat to Western Europe but do think that there is a U.S. threat—or at least a threat brought about because of the U.S. presence there, especially the U.S. nuclear presence.

## *Pure Defense and Pure Offense*

ODDLY ENOUGH (to complete this round-robin) the basic premise of the most vocal American critics of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—those who believe in a nuclear offense without defense—is a belief not unlike that of the advocates of non-nuclear defense without offense: that U.S. nuclear forces threaten the Soviet Union and that the United States needs to have the Soviets deter it. And that, these critics believe, entails assuring U.S. destruction if the United States attacks the Soviet Union. A defense of the United States would get in the way. So these American supporters of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) and a pure offense bear an uncanny resemblance to the European supporters of a pure defense.

Explaining this strange convergence takes a little elaboration. When the enthusiasm for mutual destruction seized one faction

of U.S. scientists and engineers at the end of the 1950s, they centered their efforts first on banishing any attempt at the passive defense of populations, that is, civil defense. But the targets of their political offensive soon came to encompass any active defense that might shoot down enemy bombers or missiles on their way to the United States, any effort to direct a counterattack at missiles and aircraft on the ground or at other military targets rather than cities, and any improvements in the accuracy of U.S. offense that made it capable of destroying military targets with reduced collateral harm to civilians.

In the mid-1960s the views of this faction among scientists and engineers in U.S. universities became the declaratory policy of the U.S. government. The efforts of some of the principal negotiators on the U.S. side at the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT)—particularly the attempts they made to relate offense and defense in the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty and the SALT I agreement on offense forces—were inspired by such views. John Newhouse, in a now-standard account of these negotiations, summed up the model of stability of “Washington’s assured destruction school of strategy.” (He was a member of the school, but had a certain saving sense of its Orwellian absurdity.) He said its “favorite apothegm” was that “offense is defense, defense is offense. Killing people is good, killing weapons is bad.”7

The U.S. scientists and engineers who adopted this Orwellian view near the end of the 1950s were turning the tradition of arms control that had grown up between the wars (and, indeed, the view they themselves had passionately urged for the preceding decade) precisely on its head. While the 1930s views had all the disabilities that Churchill listed, and more, they are no better upside down. Indeed, they are much worse. This upside-down view of offense and defense, and of virtuously aiming bombs at civilians and avoiding military targets, raises insoluble military and strategic problems for the Alliance. It also reduces many of its proponents to

34

The National Interest-Summer 1987

simple incoherence. Two examples come to mind: One concerns the possibility of using for offensive purposes satellite-based lasers intended for defense against missiles on their way to target. The other concerns chemical warfare.

Some physicists have opposed a ballistic missile defense of U.S. territory essentially on the grounds that any defense is bad because it could prevent the Soviets from deterring an unprovoked U.S. attack, but they have been unable to resist suggesting that satellite-based lasers are bad also because they could be used offensively—specifically to burn cities. SDI is bad, then, because it is not an offense. And because it is. There are many technical and strategic problems and some absurdities in this suggestion. If either the United States or the Soviet Union wanted merely to burn cities, there are more efficient and much cheaper ways to do it than to use lasers on satellites that are optimized for disabling missiles in their boost or mid-course phases high up in space. But the principal absurdity has to do with the implicit assumption that U.S. or Soviet leaders would take the burning of cities as their sole or main objective, and do so even if this were to bring about drastic climatic changes affecting both sides.

The second example has to do with chemical weapons. When it comes to such weapons, members of the U.S. Congress revert to the older view that offense is bad and defense is good. The Congress is for protective clothing, etc., but has resisted replacing our deteriorating and dangerous unitary chemical weapons with binaries. However, here too neither pure defense nor pure offense works well. If the U.S. has no effective chemical offense, but only protective clothing and the like, an adversary capable of using chemicals offensively at great distance from his own troops can force U.S. combatants to put on enormously cumbersome gear either in anticipation of such an attack, whether it comes or not, or during the course of a war when there are indications that an adversary has already been using such weapons. U.S.

operations would be degraded drastically. We might get off an order of magnitude fewer sorties from our air bases, for example, while an adversary who is not threatened by our retaliating effectively with chemical weapons could carry on his operations unimpeded. Such an adversary is much less likely to be deterred, since he can gain a great advantage. Chemical warfare illustrates particularly well the need for a mixture of offense and defense.

But there is worse. The upside-down view of offense and defense with its associated rhetoric ties democratic governments in a hopeless tangle of moral issues. It does not pacify the pacifist extremes of domestic opinion. It incites them. It makes for endless confusion about the difference between the declaratory and the operational policy of Allied governments, between what they say they will do and what they would actually do in the event of any of several plausible Soviet attacks. Avoiding a capacity for anything but purely suicidal offense in response to attack leads naturally to the idea (or wish) for "deterrence only" or "pure deterrence" (what the French call "dissuasion pure")—the hope that the U.S. can threaten the purely suicidal use of nuclear weapons in response to a Soviet nuclear attack and at the same time explicitly insist that nuclear weapons have no use at all except to deter. Which is to say out loud that whatever U.S. leaders threaten, they would not actually respond to an attack. Which means, of course, that they can hardly deter.

It is a symptom of the strategic disorder in the West that policy decisions critical for the Alliance's defense are so largely shaped by the desire to quiet domestic dissent, no matter how irrational, and to avoid potential disagreements among the allies even at the expense of surrendering critically needed measures for alliance defense. Arms control in particular has become a means for "managing" (that is, trying to appease) the utopian, apocalyptic antinuclear movements. At the same time the apocalyptic image of war spread by proponents of agreements designed to assure mutual destruction assures new waves of passionate opposition.

Swords without Shields 35

MAD Vs. Nuclear Guarantees to Allies

ROBERT McNAMARA, the former U.S. secretary of defense, has been most forceful in recent years in drawing out some of the consequences of the upside-down view of offense and defense involved in the MAD theory. He was the key figure in progressively altering, and perhaps the major figure in propagating, a quite fateful change in the original second-strike theory of deterrence. This theory originated in the early 1950s in the context of the use of long- or intermediate-range nuclear forces to deter or defeat a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.⁸ It stressed that in order to deter a Soviet attack on a U.S. ally, the United States would need to preserve a capability to respond even if the Soviet attack were prefaced by, or enlarged to include, an attempt to destroy the nuclear forces that the United States would need to respond to the invasion. A strategic force could not deter an attack that it could not survive. It had to be able to strike second.

The theory stressed not only the ability to respond but the likelihood of the response. To deter Soviet political leaders from using nuclear weapons in the most plausible and dangerous circumstances, the United States had to give them reason to expect it to respond and to do so in ways that would, in prospect, make the Soviet use of nuclear weapons seem riskier than the alternatives, even when these alternatives—like unexpected disaster in a conventional invasion—might seem very dangerous. It stressed, therefore, the importance of preparing a posture that would make the decision by the United States to respond to an attack one that would serve its own interests and, in particular, one that would be less risky for the United States than not responding.

With the MAD theory of deterrence, McNamara adopted that part of the second-strike theory which dealt with the necessity for a capability that would survive Soviet attack, but he ignored the part that stressed the necessity for having a force that responsible political and military leaders would ac-

tually be willing to use. MAD held that what matters for deterrence is having the capacity to inflict "unacceptable damage," even if it would be suicidal to use that capacity to respond. McNamara centered his attention on the amount of damage the United States could do and not at all on the *likelihood* that it would actually bring on that damage. The risk to the Soviets is the product of two factors: the amount of harm the United States is capable of doing, and the probability that the nation would use that capability to do harm. McNamara ignored the probability factor.

He defined "deterrence" as the *probability* of capability in any circumstance to inflict unacceptable damage, measuring the latter as the ability to kill 20 percent of the people and destroy half the manufacturing value added of the USSR—which, he said, would mean its end "as a functioning society."⁹

The theory of deterrence, as McNamara defined it, raises many questions, but it is mostly transparently incoherent, and fatally so, in taking *mutual* deterrence as a U.S. goal. It follows directly from this that the United States wanted the Soviets to be able to destroy it as a functioning society even if the United States struck first. But that implied in turn that by responding to a nuclear attack, the United States would be committing suicide. (If it responded to a Soviet nuclear attack confined to West Germany or another ally, it could not survive even though it had used an undamaged force; and if it struck second with a force that had already been partially destroyed by a Soviet attack, it would be even less able to blunt retaliation and survive.) That in turn tended to erode the credibility of any U.S. response and so to undermine the ability of the United States to deter any Soviet attack confined to an ally; or any attack at all confined enough to leave the United States the prospect of survival if it did not respond.

## Flawed Models of Stability

THE mathematical models of strategic stability that abound in the literature today proceed from MAD theory

36

and focus on the binary relation between the United States and the Soviet Union. While they have many artificialities and implicit absurdities (they are quite unrelated to Soviet thinking, for example), these models have impressed some West Europeans by their supposed demonstration that active defense or precise offense is destabilizing. The key defect they *should* notice is that such models make impossible any coherent justification for alliance relationships, or any stable multilateral world that includes some non-nuclear as well as nuclear countries—that is to say, the real world.

A perfectly stable unconditional mutual deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union would mean that the United States could not respond to, and therefore could not deter, a Soviet nuclear attack on any allied country, including the thirteen countries in Nato that have no nuclear weapons of their own. Nor could a perfectly stable, unconditional mutual deterrence between either of the two other Nato nuclear powers, Britain or France, and the Soviet Union serve to deter Soviet attack on any of their allies. The relevant conception of stability, then, cannot be captured in the binary relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union nor even by a set of stable deterrent relations between any pair of the five nuclear powers. The many-country relation among nuclear and non-nuclear powers is not as simple as that. It is rather more like the “many body” problem in physics.

The French strategic force, as originally conceived, was a small force directed at destroying Moscow's population in response to an attack that French leaders assumed would destroy France. The response would be a "dying sting." The French explicitly regarded their *force de frappe* as useful only as a last-ditch deterrent to an attack on France, not as a deterrent to an attack on any of its allies. The father of the French force, General Pierre-Marie Gallois, asserted that any such suicidal retaliation was not credible as a response to an attack that struck an ally and, by assumption, had not touched France.

More recently, during negotiations with the Soviets on the intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) the French and the Americans advanced a similar argument about the French strategic force as the basis for not including it in the matching of Nato INF with Soviet INF. Moreover, the British made the same argument (with American support) for not including the British independent deterrent: it has nothing to do with Nato; it is a last-ditch deterrent to an attack on the United Kingdom.

Now one may question the value of making threats to commit suicide in defending even one's own country from an enemy attack—if the enemy attack is selective enough to leave one's country a choice and a stake in survival, that is, an opportunity to avoid suicide. The French (and now the British too) are obviously on solid ground when they recognize that a Soviet attack directed solely at an ally would leave them such a choice, and that in such a circumstance no responsible political leader would choose national suicide. But the thirteen countries in Nato which have no nuclear weapons clearly depend for deterring a Soviet nuclear attack on a credible nuclear response from a country that does have them. They depend on the United States, and the possibility that the U.S. can use nuclear weapons without committing suicide. In fact, Britain and France, as well as the rest of European Nato, rely on the U.S. nuclear guarantee even against overwhelming conventional attack and not merely against selective Soviet nuclear attack.

It is extraordinary, therefore, that so many of the political elite in France and England have in the recent past recommended that the United States adopt a policy of making its use of nuclear weapons suicidal. During the debate at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, the British and the French opposed the development of ballistic missile defenses in the United States and supported the severe constraints imposed by the ABM treaty on even a modest active defense of U.S. silos for the reason that the U.S. might greatly extend that defense of its silos to cover

Swords without Shields 37

population centers in the United States and the Soviets might then emulate the U.S. by defending Moscow—which in turn might make British and French independent strike forces less persuasive threats against the population of Moscow.

The French and the British adopted a policy of inviting Soviet destruction of their own cities by threatening Soviet population in part because they felt their strategic nuclear forces were too small to be useful against military targets in the Soviet Union and in part because they counted on the Soviet leaders making a comprehensive and indiscriminate attack if they attacked at all. More recently, however, they have begun greatly to expand their own nuclear forces—perhaps to nearly 1,000 warheads apiece. Moreover, they have come to recognize that recent improvements in Soviet weaponry will put the Soviets increasingly in a position to make a direct attack on military targets in France or Britain with precise long-range non-nuclear weapons or extremely accurate low-yield nuclear weapons. Such an attack would clearly give France and Britain an option for survival rather than suicide. The French therefore have been moving toward an explicit policy of developing a precise nuclear force capable of destroying key Soviet military forces and of responding to selective attack in non-suicidal ways.

In the last two years especially, Nato powers (including West Germany, France, and England) have come to recognize the growth of a Soviet capability for using conventionally armed ballistic missiles effectively against military targets in Western Europe. A robust defense against a combined arms invasion, then, will have to cope with that threat. Moreover, this appears to be feasible and in many respects easier than the job of defending U.S. territory against ICBMs. Europeans are therefore seriously contemplating an expansion of their active defense to include protection not only against manned and unmanned aircraft but also against ballistic missiles. It would be absurd then for Europeans to continue to oppose parallel efforts by the

United States to defend military forces within its continental borders in the hope that, if the United States eschewed ballistic defense, French and British suicidal threats against Moscow might look a little more credible as a last resort for separating their fate from Nato's. That would not be a triumph for arms control.

Much of arms control theory during the past twenty years has come to be based explicitly or implicitly on the doctrine of MAD. The interpretation of the ABM treaty that would prevent the United States from developing and doing enough testing of ballistic missile defense subsystems and battle management to form the basis for a decision on whether to deploy such a defense is most prominently supported by those who define "strategic stability" in terms of a hypothetical suicide pact between the United States and the Soviet Union. They assign to the distinction between "first-strike weapons" and "second-strike weapons" a role analogous to the one that arms negotiators of the 1930s gave to the distinction between "offense" and "defense." Unfortunately, weapons fall even less neatly into the categories "first-strike" and "second-strike" than into "offense" and "defense."

Terms like "second-strike" and "first-strike" apply to military forces as whole connected systems (including vehicles, sensors, communications, and political military commands) in their interaction with adversary military forces as a whole. They designate system properties, not attributes of individual weapons. More obviously, many European and U.S. negotiators in the 1970s and 1980s seem to have forgotten that for excellent reasons the United States promises to respond to a Soviet nuclear attack even if it is directed solely at an ally, and promises to do so with a force that has not itself been attacked. Viewed only in the narrow context of the binary relation between the United States and the Soviet Union, that would be a first-strike. However, it would not start a war, only join one that had been started by the Soviets. In the wider context of the

38

original second-strike theory, and in the real
world of many states, some nuclear and some
non-nuclear, the prospect that the United
States would respond to a Soviet nuclear
attack on West Germany or Turkey or Nor-
way or the like with such a "first-strike" is a
necessary condition for stability.

False and Genuine Issues

THE FOREGOING analysis suggests what the proponents of pure offense have in common with the proponents of pure defense. Like the latter, they implicitly base their view on the theory that the West, or at least the United States, is quite likely to initiate an unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union, unless it is assured of total nuclear destruction should it do so. This defies common sense. The United States could have launched a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union for many years without suffering nuclear destruction. It could have done so during the long period when the Soviets had no nuclear weapons at all and even during the more extended period when their nuclear forces were small and vulnerable to attack. (The small Soviet bomber force was unprotected and in a low state of readiness. Its few land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles were unprotected by silos before 1965. Its missile-launching submarines were mainly in port, and, when out of port, noisy and easily tracked, as has recently been revealed in connection with the Walker spy ring.) In spite of dark hints by the conspiratorial left in the West, preventive war has never been seriously considered by responsible U.S. leaders. They never considered it in a period of great Soviet vulnerability when the Soviets were actively expanding their political control in Eurasia and imposing their will over dissident, newly acquired parts of their empire in Central Europe that had been associated with the West for centuries. Moreover, the Soviet leaders could hardly have been panicked by the prospect, or they would not have left themselves so open to attack while they were making these aggressive

moves. The idea that Nato or the U.S.
nuclear force was poised to pounce on the
Soviet Union was clearly absurd for the
twenty years when the Soviets had either no
nuclear force or only a quite vulnerable one.

It is even more absurd today with the
enormous protected power that the Soviets
have acquired to do the United States harm.
The notion that Nato or any of the major
powers in Nato would be likely to initiate a
preventive nuclear war against the Warsaw
Pact or the Soviet Union, if only it could be
done without committing total suicide, is a
fantasy treated solemnly in mathematical
models of strategic stability and in the rheto-
ric of Western politicians under the uncon-
scious influence of such models. It should not
be taken seriously. Nato will have difficulty
enough making the decision to respond to a
selective nuclear attack or overwhelming con-
ventional assault, not to speak of initiating an
attack that did not answer an actual invasion.

No responsible political leader in Nato
will make a decision to counterattack if he
believes that would ensure the complete de-
struction of his nation. Responsible Nato
leaders who fear attack, then, should put
themselves in a position to respond in ways
that give their adversary some stake in keep-
ing destruction under control

We should be clear. This issue is not, as
supporters of MAD pretend, between those
who predict that a large-scale exchange of
nuclear weapons could take place with per-
fect discrimination (a war "without a
smudge" as Stanley Hoffmann calls it¹⁰) and
those who claim that any significant use of
nuclear weapons will lead to exhausting the
stockpiles of all the powers and the end of
civilization on both sides—and possibly even
the human species. No substantial conflict,
nuclear or non-nuclear, is likely to be neat
and perfectly controlled. Even if we could
completely confine the destruction—which
we cannot—to military targets, the slaughter
of soldiers would be disaster enough. And
there will always be a substantial chance that
violence would climb disastrously beyond
any expected bounds.

Swords without Shields

39

The genuine issue lies between those who would try to improve the ability to be effective against military targets, to confine the destruction as much as possible to military targets rather than to civil society, and to keep destruction under gross control, on the one hand, and, on the other, those who while they profess merely to be predicting the loss of control actually attempt to arrange it. Both sorts of strategy take deterrence as primary. One holds that the West can deter Soviet attack most effectively by improving its ability and will to respond in a nonsuicidal way if deterrence fails. The other view rests its hopes for deterring on ensuring that if deterrence fails, any response the West could make to an attack would lead uncontrollably to the apocalypse.

Even the staunchest supporters of MAD doctrine, those who believe that any militarily significant use of nuclear weapons will inevitably lead to the destruction of civil society in both the East and West, quail at saying clearly that they would actually launch attacks at innocent bystanders if deterrence fails. They either imply that they would not respond at all, or—inconsistently recognizing that it is possible to exercise control and selectivity—they say that if deterrence fails, one must do everything possible to avoid killing innocent bystanders on both sides.¹¹ Such an obligation, however, does not begin when deterrence fails, and not only for moral reasons: in order to make the prospect of responding credible and deterrence therefore feasible, the West needs in time of peace to improve the means of controlling destruction and preserving civil society.

## "Revolution in Control"

THE CONTINUING industrial revolution in microelectronics and photonics is greatly increasing the feasibility of control and drastically altering the technologies of offense and defense for both the Soviets and the West. Large improvements in sensing, data processing, and control make more feasible than ever before the

precise use of small nuclear weapons designed to confine effects mainly to the military targets they destroy and of non-nuclear weapons to accomplish many missions previously achievable only with nuclear weapons or with huge, indiscriminate nonnuclear raids like the ones that destroyed Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. Moreover, essentially the same information technologies will make available an active defense that uses precise non-nuclear means to intercept substantial numbers of enemy nuclear warheads on their way to military targets located near cities—and this can form an important part of the defense of key military forces. It can also offer a measure of protection of population from collateral damage from plausible Soviet attacks. The instruments for keeping destruction under control in the course of a conflict are also becoming more effective and easier to protect, because small packages of less expensive but reliable sensors and increasingly powerful data processors and communications can be easily multiplied and moved or otherwise made less vulnerable to attack. There is also a useful interaction among capabilities for active defense, discriminating offense, and the capacity to keep them under control and direct them. (On the other hand, reckless proposals that the United States should, instead of defending its ICBMs, launch them at Soviet cities on the basis of electromagnetic indications that an enemy attack may be on the way illustrate the unfortunate way in which a doctrinaire attempt to avoid defense can worsen both the prospects for discrimination in offense and any attempt to maintain control.)¹²

The Nato countries, in accordance with their long tradition of innovation in science and technology and the agility native to open societies, can exploit the opportunities that these developments present. The Soviet Union, with a culture much less congenial to innovation, is doing everything it can to exploit them, and not in the interest of the West. These technological developments will reinforce not only the Soviet capacity for active defense of its military forces but also its

40

ability to conduct a strategy of selective attack, for example, against West Germany and the Low Countries, or against a weakly armed but critical flank of Nato, or in an area like the Persian Gulf on which the countries of Nato have come critically to depend. Such a selective strategy of attack, designed to split the Western alliance, could greatly reduce the damage to the civil society of the country invaded and leave the civil society of the other countries in Nato essentially untouched, giving Western leaders a maximum stake in exercising prudence. It is the most controllable and least risky strategy for the Soviets, especially if Nato has no appropriate response. Yet the threat of such a Soviet attack or its actual execution could endanger the autonomy of all those members of the Nato alliance that are not directly attacked.

Nato has been preoccupied with extreme contingencies and hypothetical Soviet attacks so enormous and so unselectively destructive that the suicide of the West in response would be redundant. Such extreme circumstances would make a policy of responding in a "dying sting" at least faintly plausible. (Responding would do the West no good, but neither would it do it much extra harm.) Nato strategy has drifted increasingly toward dependence on an apocalyptic threat to initiate an indiscriminate attack that it does not expect to be able to control. Worse, much of alliance policy on research, development, and deployment has deliberately avoided making Nato capable of exercising discrimination and control. Nato's strategy for negotiating and construing bilateral agreements with the Soviets is based on the same premise. Although it has been designed in the hope that any use of nuclear weapons would result in the total destruction of the Soviets as well as the West, it has succeeded only in hampering improvements in Nato's own ability to control destruction.

## Myths that Slow Technology

IN SPITE of all the stereotypes about a spiraling quantitative arms race generated by an ever-accelerating qualitative

race, which in turn is driven by U.S. technology, the fact is that if we consider deployment as distinct from research and development, U.S. military innovation has slowed. Continuing references to a quantitative strategic arms race, standard throughout the 1960s and 1970s, ignored the facts.¹³ Supporters of MAD kept talking about the quantitative spiral while the budget for strategic forces was decreasing exponentially at 8 percent a year. It is not as widely understood that the statements about an ever-accelerating qualitative race are also fantasies that sell well in Congress and in the press but have nothing to do with what has actually been happening.

The recent Presidential Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management (the Packard Commission) found that in the last twenty-five years the length of time to deploy a major weapon system has increased.¹⁴ Polaris, the first U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missile, took two or three years to become operational. The first Minuteman took about the same. The time to deploy has stretched to ten or fifteen years for major weapons systems. What the Packard Commission did not stress is that the deployment of some key innovations that cut across weapons systems and service lines, and in particular some of those affecting precision, active defense, communications, and control, have stretched out even longer, in some cases interminably.

The Defense Department was once far in advance of the commercial world in data processing and in communications, in getting innovations into the field and in research. Today many important inventions are fielded in commercial products long before they are deployed by the military. This has much to do with the inertia of large military organizations, service parochialism, and the increasingly cumbersome process of getting Congress to authorize and to appropriate funds. But the inertia and parochialism are not new. A major reason for the stretch-out is the lack of a clear national commitment to field these technologies, attributable, in large part, to the spread of MAD ideology and its accom-

Swords without Shields 41

panying hostility toward improving precision and discrimination of offense, toward fielding active defenses of military systems for fear that such defenses might be extended to protect populations, and toward improvement in the U.S. capacity to maintain control throughout a conflict for fear that this might be provocative. Theorists of a qualitative race have for a long time called for renewed efforts to "slow down the rate of weapons innovation" and "hence to reduce the frequency of introduction of ever more complex and threatening weapons"¹⁵ and have advocated the "adoption of a generalized set of restraints that would slow the whole development and deployment process."¹⁶ They have tried to accomplish this especially by limiting tests.¹⁷ One way or another they seem to have been remarkably successful.

A few examples, some familiar and some less familiar, will illustrate this point.

First, the Carter administration canceled the program to deploy neutron weapons in Europe, though European Nato members had agreed reluctantly to accept them and despite the fact that they would reduce the blast effects and hence the collateral damage done by Nato to its own civil society in stopping a massive Soviet armored invasion.

Second, high-level figures on both sides of the Atlantic agreed in 1979 to cancel earth-penetrating warheads for the Pershing II, though such warheads had gone through full-scale engineering and development and would have made it more feasible to destroy hard and semihard fixed military targets with effects substantially confined to these military targets.

Third, AIRS, the advanced inertial guidance system used in the ICBMs that the United States is now in the process of deploying, was delayed in its development by the opposition of supporters of MAD policy in the U.S. Senate even though, and indeed because, it greatly improved the precision of inertial systems and so made them capable of destroying military targets with smaller collateral effects. Such a system uses information available only in the boost phase. The

opposition did not stop its development. It did slow it.

Fourth, and more important, MAD supporters succeeded in actually stopping a half-dozen programs for research and development of mid-course and terminally guided ballistic missiles, even though such guidance can make feasible the destruction of very hard military targets with warheads of very low yields and confined collateral effects and even though such ICBMs could be much smaller, cheaper, and more easily moved and otherwise protected than any now programmed (such as the Midgetman) using only inertial guidance.

Fifth, MAD dogma reinforced the inertia characteristic of large organizations by slowing the development of long-range cruise missiles accurate enough even in adverse weather to permit the use of nonnuclear warheads to destroy a variety of quite hard military targets. One might think that replacing nuclear with nonnuclear warheads would appeal even to proponents of MAD. However, any missile with guidance good enough to destroy a distant military target with a nonnuclear warhead, weighing, say, 1000 pounds, could destroy an even more distant military target with an even higher probability if it carried a lightweight nuclear warhead weighing a fifth as much or less. Proponents of MAD have opposed these dual-capable missiles because of their dual capability.

Sixth, supporters of MAD have opposed any major effort by the United States to improve the protection of its wartime command and control on the ground that this would be a provocation of the Soviet Union.¹⁸ Meanwhile, the Soviets have spent many tens of billions of dollars over many years to elaborate a formidably effective, mutually reinforcing network of measures for protecting political and military command and control that includes deception, concealment, mobility in the air, on the ground, and below ground, dispersal, deep underground structures, and active defense. They have designed their system to survive a nuclear war, not just for peacetime use. Yet no one

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has said that their program is provocative.

Finally, the delay of a revolutionary advance in an area that is key in the crucial problem of control illustrates the factors at work. In 1961, Paul Baran proposed a method of high-speed adaptive digital switching for voice and data communication that would make it possible to use the surviving links of the extremely vulnerable hierarchical land lines with their few critical nodes in a distributed net with thousands of nodes, none more critical than any other, and to use surviving links in satellites, radio, and other media as well.¹⁹ Called packet switching, this method would have helped solve an important command and control problem, by making it possible for messages to bypass any parts of the network that were destroyed and find their way automatically to their destination. As Lawrence Roberts wrote in his account of "The Evolution of Packet Switching":

> This study [Baran's] was conducted for the Air Force and it proposed a fully distributed packet switching system to provide for all military communications, data and voice. The Study also included a totally digital microwave system and integrated encryption capability. The Air Force's primary goal was to produce a totally survivable system that contained no critical central components. Not only was this goal achieved by Rand's proposed packet switching system, but even the economics projected were superior, for both voice and data transmissions. Unfortunately, the Air Force took no follow-up action, and the report sat largely ignored for many years until packet switching was rediscovered and applied by others.²⁰

An application of packet switching was later developed by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), not for the command and control problem but as a generally applicable method for widely separated computer users to share data bases. It became the dominant commercial technology for data transmission for private networks long before it received any application to the problem that generated it. Only now—over twenty-

five years later—is it being deployed for the Ground Wave Emergency Net (GWEN) for low data rate transmissions in the military; it is planned to form the basis of the Defense Data Network in the 1990s. Its application to voice transmission started being used commercially in 1986, and it will be key in the basic architecture for the AT&T system in the 1990s. But so far it is not planned for any substantial use in voice transmission for military communications, though the military application is in many important respects easier.

These long delays have something to do with bureaucratic inertia and the particular difficulties incurred because command and control programs tend to be joint rather than for an individual service. However, the inertia is reinforced by the neglect of command and control by the highest levels of government, encouraged by doctrines that threaten mutual destruction and count on losing control, if not at the start of a nuclear war then soon after.

ARMS AGREEMENTS have similarly slowed innovation. The SALT I offense agreement and ABM treaty—frequently referred to as the “jewels in the crown” of arms control—were supposed to relate limits on U.S. defense to restraints on Soviet offense. They were also based on the perverse dogma that the superpowers should have weapons capable only of destroying population and none that could destroy the other side’s weapons on the ground or on their way to target. The ABM treaty severely restricted not only the defense of cities but even, contrary to the dogma, the defense of ICBM silos and national command and control. Moreover, some key U.S. negotiators wanted the ABM treaty to proscribe even the future development and testing (not only the deployment) of improved small, mobile sensors and mobile interceptors and any improved means of protecting ICBM silos, command centers, and other key military forces. Although the dogma summarized by John Newhouse would seem to make

Swords without Shields 43

protecting weapons good and only protecting people bad, these negotiators were concerned that even if a silo defense could not protect people, it might become part of a thick defense of the entire population of the country at some future date—a vast additional enterprise taking many years, which one might think could be dealt with separately if it were plainly wicked. The SALT I offense agreement professed to replace active defense of U.S. ICBM silos with a Soviet commitment not to deploy any additional missiles with warheads capable of destroying them. This was supposed to be accomplished by prohibiting any increase in the number of silos for "heavy missiles." But the Soviets squeezed many more warheads than U.S. negotiators thought possible (though they had been plainly warned) into both heavy and light missiles and drastically improved the precision of their warheads. As a result the number of warheads capable of destroying ICBM silos that they eventually acquired was nearly three and possibly six times greater than these U.S. negotiators had expected.

The ABM treaty was explicitly directed at constraining defenses against "strategic" ballistic missiles. It was never intended to prevent a defense against the sort of "tactical" ballistic missiles that threaten Europe or that might be deployed on Soviet ships as a weapon to be used against carriers or other ships at sea. In the early 1970s, the Soviets tested the SS-NX-13, an anti-shipping ballistic missile which used its second stage for midcourse corrections, homing on electromagnetic emissions from a carrier task force's defense radars. It was similar in size to the Soviet SS-N-6 ballistic missile. Carrying a substantial nuclear warhead with an accuracy of about 1,000 feet—more than accurate enough to make the payload lethal²¹—and with its few-hundred mile range, the SS-NX-13 could be launched from well outside the surveillance coverage of a carrier task force. The U.S. Navy proposed a defense against this development, whose major components were the Aegis radar and a nuclear version of its air defense "Standard Missile," the SM-2.

While the treaty clearly did not envisage stopping defense against a ballistic missile threat to the fleet at sea, some in the Department of Defense bureaucracy argued that such a defense could always be moved into U.S. ports or deployed on land and so would become a defense against strategic ICBMs. The development therefore was stopped. Fortunately, it appears that the SS-NX-13 never reached operational status.

Some of the current arguments against developing a ballistic-missile defense for Europe are essentially the same as those against the SM-2 and Aegis. They display a serious difficulty characteristic of the kind of arms control arrangements that have dominated the debate in the West for the last two decades. Every military system can be used more or less effectively to achieve more than one objective, and any military objective can be achieved in more than one way. Proposals of agreements based on MAD tend to argue against any new U.S. system, even one clearly dedicated to a permitted purpose, on the ground that it could, if only with great difficulty and over many years, be diverted or used for some forbidden purpose. On the other hand, when the Soviets actually develop or deploy a system that clearly is dedicated to a forbidden purpose, they tend to argue that the Soviets could have in mind a more benign permitted purpose. A radar that is obviously designed to aid in battle management for the defense against ICBMs can always be explained away as serving the function of tracking space vehicles, even if it is poorly placed for that purpose.

Bureaucracies develop a vested interest in the continuation of any status quo, and in the West this includes conforming to the status quo of an arms agreement even if an adversary does not. Supporters of MAD sometimes explicitly assume that it is beneficial for "arms control" when such bureaucratic inertia leads Western governments to lose sight of their original goal in the agreement of securing Soviet restraint and leads them to continue to comply with the agreement while the Soviets make massive preparations to violate

44

it and do so.²² That happened during the moratorium on nuclear testing from 1958 to 1961, which ended with a surprise Soviet 60-megaton bang and an unprecedentedly elaborate and carefully prepared sequence of Soviet tests. The Soviet bureaucracy, which is not always inert, had responded efficiently to the political leadership, and the Soviet leaders had political and military goals that were quite incompatible with those the British and Americans had in mind.

## Implausible Threats

IN DECIDING whether or not to develop or deploy new technologies for offense and defense—and not only in preparing arms agreements—Western leaders and Western publics ought to consider more soberly than they do Soviet leader's political and military objectives and their likely course of behavior in a variety of realistic contingencies. Decisions on developing and deploying new technologies should take into account how any innovation will protect Western interests in such contingencies. Frequently, however, the debate appears to be about details of the technical feasibility and performance of some proposed new system. And close examination reveals that the technical arguments in opposition are often crucially affected by preposterous assumptions about the possible circumstances and objectives of a Soviet attack in which we might need the proposed new military system.

For example, the debate about the proposed Safeguard ballistic missile defense of Minutemen silos appeared to the Congress and the news media to be about innumerable calculations on the performance of radars and high-acceleration interceptor missiles and about whether Soviet missiles in prospect for the end of the 1970s and 1980s would have accurate enough Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs) to endanger the Minuteman silos even if there were no silo defense. The Congress and the public do not in general feel qualified to

evaluate such calculations. They tend to accept the authority of one faction or another of the technologists, for the calculations are of the sort normally performed by professional operations researchers, system analysts and system engineers.

In fact, the arguments against introducing an active defense for silos had numerous technical flaws. Those who said that Minuteman silos would need no defense made mistakes in algebra, in arithmetic, and even in reading points off graphs.²³ But the serious defects in the debate were more fundamental: the genuine issues were hardly debated. Some proponents of Safeguard believed—correctly as it turned out—that Minuteman was likely to become vulnerable by the end of the 1970s, that an active defense would be a useful supplement to the passive defense of ICBMs, and that an active ballistic missile defense, even if it started off imperfectly, could be improved as the technology developed, permitting the use of smaller, more mobile radars and sensing and guidance that would make possible the use of nonnuclear interceptors. Above all, they felt, this was an important line of development and one useful in the long-run. (Polaris was deployed at the end of the 1950s long before it was perfected, and it was continually improved. It is doubtful that any complex new system would ever be deployed if the United States insisted on meeting all the possible countermeasures that can be conjured up by those who oppose it in principle. In fact, part of the reason for the slowdown in U.S. deployment of major weapons systems has been the unrealistic demands for performance imposed by those who take a Luddite view of military innovation in general.)

Opponents of Safeguard were against it primarily because they thought an active ballistic missile defense of silos might in the future be made part of a much larger, thick system to defend populations, and they were in principle against the defense of population because they subscribed to the MAD doctrine. Some key opponents suggested that rather than defend ICBMs, we should launch

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45

them automatically at Soviet cities on the basis of electromagnetic indications that an attack might be on its way. And although they talked much about the defects of an initial ABM defense based on a few fixed large radars, they attempted in the ABM treaty to prevent research and development that would lead to small, mobile radars of the kind they had said were necessary. The discussion of the treaty and the unilateral decision on defense paid inadequate attention to Soviet political and military objectives in seeking a treaty or the realistic circumstances in which the Soviets might be tempted to launch a nuclear attack.

THE contemporary debate on ballistic missile defense centered on the SDI is as badly informed as the debate in 1969 on Safeguard. Once again, it seems to be about the intricate details of technological and systems analytic issues—the number of space-based chemical laser platforms needed to destroy Soviet ICBMs in their boost phase and the like. And again the media headlines offer sweeping judgments by apparently authoritative experts who claim they have shown that any useful ballistic missile defense is essentially infeasible—astronomically costly and easily overcome by the Soviets.

There are indeed large technological uncertainties that need to be resolved before deciding on deploying or not deploying an active ballistic missile defense as part of the U.S. and alliance mixture of forces. These, however, are unlikely to be resolved except as the result of an extensive research, development, and testing program of the sort proposed by the SDI Office. In fact, to inform that decision is precisely the purpose of such a program.

The arguments that have been raised against a program of research, development, testing, and evaluation hardly address the real issues. They pretend more knowledge than anyone has at this stage about the technological alternatives. They avoid in particular any serious consideration of the variety of circumstances in which the Soviets might use ballistic missiles against the Western alliance,

the kinds of attack they are likely to make, the political and military objectives likely to govern such an attack, and the objectives appropriate for the U.S. and its allies in defending against such an ICBM attack. The systems analytic arguments embodied in early reports on the subject have gained an authority they do not deserve from the famous namesustered to sign the reports and the sheer mass of the number of signatures.

Take the question about the number of space-based laser platforms needed by the defense in the boost phase and its cost implications. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in March 1984 issued a report signed by Hans Bethe, Richard Garwin, Kurt Gottfried, Henry Kendall, Carl Sagan, and many others well known in scientific disciplines only distantly related to the key issues. They include some signers who at various times have worked on some of the technologies associated with national defense. The UCS report said that "we need 2,400 such laser weapons in orbit altogether" and that the cost would therefore be prohibitive compared to the cost of offsetting counter-measures in the boost phase.²⁴ By the time the report was ready for distribution, however, the press release suggested a little caution. It claimed only that "over 1,000 such satellites" would be essential.²⁵ But that, it developed, was not nearly cautious enough. In the controversy that ensued, Gregory Canavan and his colleagues at Los Alamos were able to demonstrate some obvious blunders in the calculations.²⁶ By October 1984, Bethe, Garwin, Gottfried, and Kendall, key UCS signers of the report, had reduced the original number by a factor of eight, to 300,²⁷ and the UCS had put out a new report, *The Fallacy of Star Wars*, with the number 300. Later revisions in correspondence with Canavan brought the number down to about 100.²⁸

All models simplify, but the models used by the UCS not only make excessively simplifying assumptions about the missile launch configuration, the laser-to-booster assignment, and the motion of the lasers and platforms during the battle; they also ignore the

46

adverse effects on the Soviet offense brought about by some Soviet tactics they would propose to defeat the defense in the boost phase. These tactics would expose Soviet ICBMs to greater troubles in later phases of flight. (For example, launching all boosters simultaneously spreads out the reentry vehicles (RVs) on their arrival in the terminal phase and so makes them more vulnerable to terminal defenses.) The models ignore the fact that orbiting satellites not in position to attack ICBMs in the boost phase may be able to intercept submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) in midcourse. That alters the relevant ratios of cost of defense to cost of offense.

The UCS models also assume strategies for the basing of the Soviet ICBMs that concentrate them all at a point, making obsolete a huge Soviet investment in existing silos that are now strung out along a 5,000-mile arc following the Transiberian Railroad in Asia as well as along the main transportation net in the European Soviet Union. Aside from that, such concentration of all the Soviet ICBMs at a point would expose them to Western offense in ways that the Soviets would not welcome if they contemplated making a ballistic missile attack during the course of a conventional invasion in the Eurasian periphery (an important example of a useful synergy between offense and defense). Brian Chow and Jon Arenberg have developed a linear programming model that uses more realistic satellite constellations and can handle any distribution of Soviet ballistic missile launch points, including the plausible launch points for SLBMs. Their preliminary results suggest that the UCS number of 300 satellites is too high by a factor of three to five.²⁹

Perhaps the most fundamental defect of calculations like those of the UCS resides in the implicit assumptions about the nature of the Soviet attack and the political-military objectives the Soviets might seek by attacking. In brief, they assume that the Soviets would open a war with an attack directed at destroying innocent bystanders rather than trying to further some concrete political-

military purpose such as to remove obstacles to their invasion of West Europe. If killing harmless civilians is all they have in mind in a surprise attack, they might be satisfied if only a small percentage of their weapons were to get through. These would kill a great many bystanders. But such a military objective would be absurd. It is very different from the sorts of military objectives that might interest the Politburo.

The March 1984 UCS report carries absurdities about Soviet attack to the furthest point in suggesting that the Soviets might carry out such an attack even if they knew it could cause a "nuclear winter." A year or two earlier, some meteorologists and other natural scientists had come up with a new physical phenomenon. They claimed that any Soviet attack substantial enough to have a significant military effect would send so much smoke from burning cities into the troposphere, and loft even higher into the stratosphere so much fine submicron dust from nuclear weapons exploding near the surface of underground targets, that the heat and light from the sun would be blocked, and temperatures would fall disastrously throughout the Northern hemisphere.³⁰ The direct rebound from the Soviets' own weapons would then endanger life in the Soviet Union even if Nato did not respond. In that case, Nato leaders would not have to face the terrible decision. There would be no need for Nato to sting, for the Soviets would have stung themselves. If the scale of a Soviet first strike had to be large enough to cross the threshold of nuclear winter, they could in the words of Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research "win for two weeks only, until the cloud of nuclear smoke or dust comes back over."³¹

But the newly discovered uncertain potential that huge nuclear attacks directed at cities may have for causing a nuclear winter does not fill the void in MAD doctrine. Instead it makes more clearly visible the preposterous assumptions about Soviet attacks and Western responses that are at the heart of the MAD doctrine. A close exami-

Swords without Shields

47

nation of the scenarios that form the basis for
nuclear winter calculations demonstrates
this, quite apart from all the uncertainties
about the physical phenomena connected
with nuclear winter, such as the density of
fuel in various locations, how much of it
would burn and send particles of smoke and
dust into the atmosphere, how the clouds of
dust and smoke would be transported verti-
cally and horizontally, and so forth. Such
scenarios invariably resolve uncertainties as
to how the Soviets might use nuclear weap-
ons and how the West would and should
respond by assuming that such decisions
would be made without any regard for avoid-
ing self-destruction. In fact, in these scenar-
ios, the two sides appear to take part in an
intricate collaboration to ensure that their
nuclear weapons will have little relevant mil-
itary effect but will do enormous collateral
damage to civil society locally and globally.
In the international study of nuclear winter
and other environmental consequences of nu-
clear war sponsored by the Royal Swedish
Academy, the two superpowers are pre-
sumed to explode fifteen nuclear weapons
with a total yield of 10 megatons over each
one of such cities as Hong Kong, Bombay,
Calcutta, New Delhi, Madras, Dacca,
Jakarta, Manila, and Sydney. That would
generate a great deal of smoke, but it is not
clear what it is supposed to do to further the
objectives of either side in a military cam-
paign.

It is true that political and military lead-
ers and large bureaucratic organizations often
act mindlessly. But theorists of bureaucracy
tend not merely to describe the inertia of
bureaucracy; many prescribe it. There is a
naive cynicism in supposing that we can do
nothing to avoid self-destructive courses of
action. And it is worse than naive to suppose
that the Soviets, if they attacked, would
never use nuclear weapons except in a way
that would lead to their own destruction. As
for the West, such an image of the conse-
quences of any nuclear response to a Soviet
nuclear attack leads more naturally to capit-
ulation than to rash acts. Indeed bureaucra-

cies, though frequently irrational, are not
always—nor often—irrationally daring.

In any case, such lurid views of a nuclear
exchange shape the course of much policy
discussion in ways that are not widely under-
stood. The Soviets make their own contribu-
tion to Western debate by encouraging the
notion that if they attack, they would destroy
Western society even if in the process they
destroyed themselves. This has been plenti-
fully illustrated in the discussion of the SDI.
Hans Bethe, Richard Garwin, Carl Sagan,
and other UCS members in their 1984 report
prophesied that if the United States were to
attempt any "serious" protection of its cities,
a "likely response" by the Soviet Union
would be "to target its missiles so as to
maximize damage to the U.S. population"
even though that would "pose serious danger
of triggering a climatic catastrophe (the nu-
clear winter phenomenon)."³²

This preoccupation with the most cata-
strophic sort of attack is widespread in the
West. Some of the technologists who advo-
cate President Reagan's SDI have focused on
attacks no less preposterous than those pos-
ited by the opponents. They have considered
Soviet attacks involving as many as 30,000
strategic ballistic missile warheads (many
times the present total) all directed at cities in
an all-out, bolt-out-of-the-blue attack.³³ And
they have concentrated on the far-fetched
objective of intercepting all of the warheads
in such an absurd attack.

Plausible Threats

MUCH MORE MODEST and achievable objectives are relevant to deterring the most plausible Soviet attacks, those that would be directed at removing military obstacles to an invasion they might make in the Eurasian periphery. The more likely Soviet attacks might use ballistic missiles to achieve a high confidence of destroying military obstacles (either in the United States or in Europe) to an invasion of Europe.

48

Europeans understandably are most concerned about a defense against the growing ballistic missile threat against Western Europe, which they like to think of as an extension of existing defenses against manned and unmanned aircraft. Against such attacks, a more modest ballistic missile defense could form an effective component of a robust NATO posture that included an offense capable of responding selectively against military targets in the Warsaw Pact, including the Soviet Union. Such a defense of Western military facilities (which are always redundant in a way that population is not) could deprive the Soviets of the confidence they would require that they could destroy a large enough proportion of the military obstacles that stand in their way. Such a defense could therefore help to deter Soviet attack.

The Soviets will have ballistic missiles capable of delivering conventional as well as nuclear warheads effectively. Ballistic missile attacks with nonnuclear warheads could be an important element of the initial wave in a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Such attacks would exploit the fact that key elements in Nato's conventional force posture for many political reasons are less effectively dispersed and protected than the Warsaw Pact forces. In order to obtain a robust conventional posture in West Europe, the United States should consider urgently the early deployment of ballistic missile defense there. Such a defense is not proscribed by the ABM treaty, which is directed at restricting the defense against strategic ballistic missiles. The Soviets, moreover, are in the process of developing, testing, and deploying such a defense. (Raymond Garthoff, a strong supporter of MAD and the ABM treaty, has said that the Soviets have already tested an antitactical ballistic missile against their Scaleboard, an offense missile of roughly the same range as the Pershing I.)³⁴

Moreover, contrary to statements made by many British supporters of MAD at the time of the UCS report, the job of defending against ballistic missiles, such as the SS-22, SS-23, and SS-20, that threaten targets deep

inside Western Europe is not much harder than the job of defending the United States against ICBMs. In important respects, it is easier. This runs counter to the common impression that because tactical ballistic missiles take less time to get from their launch point to target, they would be harder to intercept. However, such missiles reenter the atmosphere at much slower speeds than ICBMs. They spend a larger proportion of their time on trajectory in the atmosphere, in the boost phase as well as after reentry. They have more difficulty in deploying persuasive decoys for several reasons. Because these missiles are launched from much closer by, even sensors on an airborne as distinct from a space platform should be able to track them from the boost phase on. In fact the airborne optical system, which could supplement the Airborne Warning and Control Aircraft (AWACs) recently deployed in Nato, would be a particularly promising and early component of a layered preferential defense of the-ater targets.

For that very reason, we may expect that those who are committed to MAD are likely to oppose the airborne optical system in particular and ballistic missile defense in gen-eral in the European theater. Political leaders, fearful of rocking the boat, may do the same.

That would be too bad. Even if ground launched ballistic missiles are banned by treaty from Western Europe, Europeans will need a defense against ballistic missiles. No one familiar with the realities should ignore the fact that the Soviets can use SLBs and can hide hundreds of ground-based theater ballistic missiles. Against ballistic attacks so constrained, a theater ballistic missile defense could be particularly useful.

## The Defense of Europe

THE PHRASE "extended deter-rence," which became common in the strategic debate about twenty-five years ago, has always been misleading. It suggests that the original purpose of the U.S.

Swords without Shields 49

strategic force was to deter an attack on U.S. cities and that the notion of extending its purpose to the defense of Europe was a later and quite doubtful stretching of the original idea. That is not so. The Soviets are not likely to attack the United States in the hope of occupying it. They might attack U.S. military forces in the United States or in Western Europe that stood in the way of their invading Europe (just as the Japanese attacked the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor because it stood in the way of their expanding to the south). Nato started with the idea that if the Soviet Union attacked Western Europe, the United States would respond against the Soviet Union with "strategic bombing promptly by all means possible with all types of weapons without exception".³⁵

That was central in the Strategic Concept for the Integrated Defense of the North Atlantic Area which was agreed to between the signing of the Nato treaty and its ratification. The phrase "all types of weapons without exception," was meant to include, most plainly, nuclear weapons. The Military Committee dropped the explicit mention of the atomic bomb, despite the desire of the Belgians, Italians, and Dutch to make it explicitly, only because of the domestic political sensitivities of the Scandinavians.³⁶

Nonetheless, all of Nato's founders had made it quite clear: they depended on the then-new U.S. technology of nuclear weapons as a principal way to deter or to respond to a Soviet attack on Western Europe. Specifically, they were relying on the U.S. strategic nuclear offensive force to compensate for the preponderance of Soviet conventional military force and for an intrinsic geographical disadvantage—the fact that Western Europe was much farther from its major ally than it was from its principal enemy.

Joe 1, the first Soviet nuclear explosion, also occurred between the signing of the Nato treaty and its ratification and even before the Military Committee developed the Nato Strategic Concept. The prospect that the Soviets would develop a large stock of nuclear weapons of their own, as Dean Acheson

noted even then, in 1949, made a continuing heavy reliance on nuclear weapons to deter a Soviet conventional invasion questionable.³⁷ But it only underlined the importance of a U.S. nuclear guarantee embodied in the treaty. Credible promises of a nuclear response would be needed at the least, from then on, to deter Soviet nuclear attack against any Nato country that had no nuclear weapons. As the Soviet stockpile grew, the United States and Nato made it evident that the Strategic Concept applied also to deterring or answering a Soviet nuclear attack on one or more of the sovereign countries in Western Europe.

The U.S. strategic force, then, was intended from the outset to deter or defend against a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. It was intended to compensate for the Soviet advantage in the theater and the instability that that advantage could mean.

Discussions of stability among U.S. strategists and European political elites in the last two decades or so have frequently been trivial because they neglect this obvious fact. They contract or shrink the initial idea of deterrence to an artificial two-person game between the superpowers, or between the "Country A" and "Country B" fabled in academia. Country A typically exhausts its strategic stockpile trying, for no stated purpose, to destroy the strategic force of Country B—and incidentally may destroy a large part of Country B's civil society. Country B automatically, without any need for an act of decision by its leaders, retaliates by destroying Country A's cities. Because such models assume that the decision to retaliate would be automatic, some British writers have described this sort of deterrent as "passive." Herman Kahn called it a "Type 1" as distinct from a "Type 2" deterrent. A Type 2 deterrent is not supposed to be automatic nor does it have to be immediate. For Type 2 deterrence, Kahn said, "There is no need to promise to destroy the enemy within fifteen minutes. It is perfectly all right to promise to destroy him somewhat later."³⁸

In such discussions, a deterrent force of

50

either type is generally assumed to promise
revenge against an adversary's cities. But
that, as Kahn said, suggests that U.S. leaders
"might be deterred from attacking the Soviet
heartland even to avenge a Soviet attack on
Europe." As well they might if it meant the
United States too would be destroyed. But
since even a "Type I" deterrent in reality
requires decisions actually to respond, U.S.
leaders should be deterred by the prospect of
committing national suicide even in reply to
an attack on U.S. territory that left civil
society largely intact.

All such models of deterrence are quite
sterile. They bear almost no relation to the
circumstances in which either the Soviet
Union or the United States might plausibly
use nuclear weapons—for example, as an
outgrowth of a conventional invasion to ex-
pand Soviet control over Europe—and no
relation to the objectives that either side
might reasonably have in using nuclear weap-
ons in such circumstances. In the real world,
the Soviet Union might be tempted to use
nuclear weapons to overcome military obsta-
cles in the course of a conventional invasion
through the North German plain and
through the Low Countries, or, more likely,
on a flank of Western Europe or in the Persian
Gulf. And they might be deterred by the
prospect that the Western leaders—without
destroying the Soviet Union or the West—
could responsibly decide to reply in kind and
defeat such an attack.

Moreover, the Nato Strategic Concept,
like the Nato treaty, was intended to deter
Soviet attack and thus prevent a war. How-
ever, in the event of a Soviet attack it was
understood that the Strategic Air Command
(SAC) would use its nuclear weapons. There
was no flimflam about nuclear weapons serv-
ing *only* to deter nuclear war, never to fight it.
"Deterrence Only"—the notion that the West
should threaten the use of nuclear weapons
but never actually use them if the threat did
not work—received some official sanction as a
declaratory policy in the United States rather
recently (the 1970s), and then with substan-
tial confusion. (It had already begun to dom-

inate the views of political elites in Europe.)
But when Robert McNamara, in the mid-
1960s, introduced the idea of using threats of
mutual assured destruction, he also made
clear that if deterrence failed, he would actu-
ally use nuclear weapons. (He had not yet
come explicitly to "Deterrence Only.") But
he would use them against military forces,
not cities.

McNamara used the confused MAD
rhetoric, and rhetoric has an effect even on
the rhetoricians. It is hard for our political
leaders to keep single books straight; double
books may be impossible. The suicidal rhet-\oric of MAD encouraged Western govern-
ments, and especially the U.S. government,
to strip themselves of defenses and to neglect
the powerful trends in the technologies of
sensing, information, and control that have
increasingly made active defense and discrim-
inating offense feasible. Even more, it en-
couraged Western leaders to ignore the sig-
nificance of the fact that the Soviets were
vastly increasing their power to make a West-
ern unrestrained response to a Soviet selec-
tive attack an unthinkable disaster for the
West; and that, at the same time, the Soviets
were building a capability to execute attacks
that might achieve important political-mili-
tary objectives and yet fall far short of causing
the apocalypse. It would remain for the
United States to bring on the apocalypse—or
surrender. Concentrating always on the
worst possible case, an attack that destroyed
the civil society within the territorial bounds
of each of the major countries in Nato, the
West has tended to disarm itself for respond-
ing to the real dangers, and especially those
outside the immediate boundaries of the three
nuclear powers.

The phrase "Mutual Assured Destruct-
tion" deliberately obscures the fact that the
victim of a nuclear attack is by no means sure
to respond with nuclear weapons. (He might
give up if that were the only hope for surviv-
ing.) And it obscures the fact that even if both
sides used nuclear weapons, it is by no means
certain that decision-makers on either side
would let destruction get out of all control.

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51

Worse still, it obscures the choice the United States has (and ought to exercise) of improving its ability to reduce the harm done to civilians by nuclear attacks on military targets. The United States can reduce such unintended harm through increasing precision and discriminateness, and by improving and exercising control if the use of nuclear weapons is forced upon it.

Finally, those who adopted MAD as only a declaratory policy weakened both the deterrent and the possibility of discrimination. They seemed to hold out the threatening possibility of attacks directly on cities but at the same time promised in the event to try to avoid cities and confine attacks to military targets. They stressed the capability for destroying cities and therefore did not seriously pursue the technologies that would have made it easier to avoid destroying Soviet cities and more feasible to contain the harm done to cities in the West. They talked increasingly about the capability to respond by inflicting ruin and less about the credibility of that capability's actual use.

McNamara, for example, came to talk less and less persuasively about precision and damage limitation, while his followers actually opposed discriminateness and active defense. Till the end of his term as secretary of defense, his Annual Posture Statements continued to treat damage limiting as an objective of our strategic force second only to deterrence. But this was strictly inconsistent with the notion of assuring mutual destruction for mutual deterrence. Ultimately, after leaving office, he abandoned even the "thin" defense he had proposed of U.S. territory and population, useful against ballistic missiles of the sort likely to be acquired by Third World countries. Then he and his followers unexpectedly opposed the point defense of our offensive force. The United States more than any other major or middle power in the East or the West gave up active defense of military forces or civilian society, even against manned and unmanned aircraft.

When McNamara first adopted the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction, he had

used it as an arbitrary budgetary device for measuring "how much is enough?" and indicated he did not seriously intend to use that capability to attack cities. He said he would actually use the strategic force against Soviet military forces that threatened the United States. But then he talked as if the United States would and should use the strategic force only against cities. Finally, he talked about the strategic force (and in fact any nuclear force) as if it should not be used at all. Almost inevitably, this has meant ending with a call for no use of nuclear weapons at all, first or second, early or late. That has not increased the credibility of the U.S. deterrent. In sum, a public doctrine and model of stability that became widespread in the mid-1960s ended by eroding the basis for determining nuclear attack, and most obviously nuclear attack on an ally. This has been destabilizing.

## Beyond National and Alliance Frontiers

THERE WILL always be an irreducible chance of an enormous disaster, but we should use a mixture of offensive and defensive measures to decrease rather than to increase this possibility in the event of war. The Soviets can be deterred by lesser threats than total destruction from doing what they may want to do against the West. The possibility of total destruction will hang over them as well as us. But that possibility is not large enough to preclude all potential uses of nuclear weapons by the Soviets. Most plainly, it will not remove the temptation for the Soviets to use nuclear weapons in places that are important for the West as well as the East but remote from the major cities of all the nuclear powers and where the Soviets may have run into trouble in the course of a conventional incursion. To remove that temptation, we do not have to threaten universal ruin. We merely need to make it credible that the Soviets would risk more in using nuclear weapons than in not using them. But members of Nato do have to look

52

beyond the narrow boundaries of their own
homelands. Sometimes, as in the case of the
Persian Gulf, even beyond the boundaries of
Nato.

The situation in Nato today in many
respects resembles the one Colonel Charles
de Gaulle tried unsuccessfully to warn the
French General Staff about before World
War II. The strategy of France (the General
noted in his memoirs) corresponded to the
moral weakness of the Third Republic. It was
dominated by the concept of defending the
fixed and continuous frontier of France. By
proclaiming the French intention to keep its
armies at the frontier, it was egging its enemy
on to act against the weak areas isolated by
that strategy: the Saar, the Rhineland, Aus-
tria, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Po-
land, and, in the end, even the Netherlands
and Belgium. If war came, the strategy was to
fight as little as possible. In a way, it com-
bined the worst of two strategies: it involved
extending guarantees to weak states that were
depending on France—and on which France
ultimately depended—and, at the same time,
following a course of action that indicated
that the guarantees would not be fulfilled.

It is unfortunate that not only France and
General de Gaulle, but the United States and
the alliance as a whole, have so far ignored the
Colonel's advice.

EVASIONS AND MUDDLE on the
meaning of nuclear guarantees to
allies without nuclear weapons of their own
(and confusion on the need for effective,
non-suicidal responses to attack on any ally or
on oneself; and on the defects in any arms
negotiation or arms policy that ignores or
even opposes this need) have never been more
apparent than in the current debate, here and
in Western Europe, on the "zero option" for
U.S. and Soviet forces. The disarray is pal-
pable among Republicans and Democrats,
liberals and neo-libs, conservatives and neo-
cons: Senator Byrd, the Democratic Majority
Leader cautioned President Reagan to go slow;
Senator Nunn reminded us that the necessary
build-up in conventional forces would cost

more than any savings made by reducing nu-
clear missiles, while Jim Wright, the leader of
the Democratic Majority in the House, hailed
the breakthrough as enabling large transfers of
funds from defense to social programs; and
Richard Perle appeared to join forces with Paul
Warnke, President Carter's disarmament nego-
tiator, and with Spurgeon Keeny, the President
of the Arms Control Association.

Reducing U.S. and Soviet intermediate
range nuclear missiles to zero had been im-
plicit in the "two-track" decision NATO
made in 1979. The second track meant that
Nato would stop at any point and reverse the
process (still incomplete today) of deploying
the Pershing II ballistic missiles and the
ground launched cruise missiles, if the Sovi-\ets did likewise with their SS-20s. The limi-
tation needed only to be "consistent with the
principle of equality between the sides."
Each, in short, could be equal to zero.

The 1979 communique said that such an
arms control agreement on INF in Europe
would "promote stability and detente in Eu-
rope in consonance with Nato's basic policy
of deterrence, defense and detente as enunci-
ated in the Harmel Report." The reference to
that 1967 report is revealing. Its acceptance
by Nato coincided with the formal adoption
of MC 14/3, or "Flexible Response," an ap-
parent move away from the strategy of mas-
sive retaliation towards the position adopted
by the United States in the Acheson Report
six years earlier. The Acheson Report ended
the strategy of massive retaliation at the time
because it recognized that while we could
respond without restraint to conventional at-
tack, it was increasingly incredible that we
would. It emphasized the raising of the nu-
clear threshold, not its removal. In fact the
emphasis on trying to defeat a substantial
conventional attack at its own level and to use
nuclear weapons if, and only if, conventional
defenses were overwhelmed, fit well with the
proposal by McNamara in his Athens speech
a year later to use nuclear weapons only
against military targets to accomplish some
political military purpose. It was more cred-
ible that we would use conventional force to

Swords without Shields 53

JOBNAME: 2952 PAGE: 54 SESS: 13 OUTPUT: Tue Jun 2 13:46:19 1987

repel a conventional invasion and, if our conventional forces were overwhelmed, that we would use nuclear weapons, if we could use them discriminately and for a military purpose. Mutual suicide was neither operational nor declaratory policy at that time.

When Nato adopted MC 14/3, however, it bent and twisted the American strategy of flexible response. It put less emphasis on Nato's will to use its capabilities by making this use less self-destructive and more on the capabilities themselves for increasing destruction. That is, it stressed threats to "escalate" by steps to the "ultimate deterrent" of a "general nuclear war"—which by 1967 both Europeans and Americans equated with suicide. Characteristically, as the Alliance moved towards depending on apocalyptic nuclear bluff for its defense, and towards a stress on *capabilities* for inflicting nuclear destruction rather than on the *credibility* of policies involving the use of nuclear weapons when necessary, it also placed the main burden on arms control of pacifying the pacifist left's hopes and apocalyptic fears. But the fact that the establishment and anti-establishment had the same vision of nuclear war as the end of the world made certain that an establishment policy of threatening nuclear destruction would never pacify the left. When governments are not serious about war, they tend towards arms agreements that are not serious either. (Serious arms agreements with a deeply hostile country would not replace, but only offer a certain amount of help to an intrinsically robust system developed by serious unilateral effort.)³⁹ The seeds of the 1979 two-track decision and of the zero option today were planted in 1967.

The Harmel Report said: "The way to peace and stability in Europe rests in particular on the use of the Alliance constructively in the interest of detente. The participation of the USSR and the USA will be necessary to achieve a settlement of the political problems in Europe." The USSR and the U.S. were equally to be partners in the arms control process—as they were, apparently, equally threats. The Report even invoked the United

Nations with respect to the defense problems of Nato's Southeastern flank and of "out-of-area" conflicts, like those in the southern and eastern littoral of the Mediterranean and in the Persian Gulf, where in particular American policy seemed to Europeans to threaten their interest and where the Europeans preferred to separate themselves from the U.S.

Arms control was to be the senior partner to defense in finding peace and stability in Europe. In fact Helmut Schmidt and other Europeans had two motives in calling for the United States to place intermediate range missiles in Europe. The first motive had something to do with political military policy: they wanted U.S. missiles in Europe that were able to reach the Soviet Union because they thought that would "couple" the U.S. more closely to the defense of Europe. The presence of such missiles would make it more likely that the U.S. would use strategic forces based in the United States to respond to an attack on the European center. Some normally thoughtful men even suggested that it would make a U.S. strategic response "automatic."

The second motive had to do with domestic politics, with pacifying antinuclear sentiment in Western Europe. For this purpose the American missiles were meant merely as a symbolic offset to the Soviet SS-20s, with none necessary if there were no SS-20s. That would be accomplished by the second track which demonstrated a politically appropriate spirit of conciliation. The second track, of course, would do nothing for the first purpose. To their domestic publics and to the Soviets, Europeans expressed their support for the zero option, made trips to Moscow assuring Brezhnev or Andropov or Gorbachev that President Reagan himself sincerely wanted the zero option. But the Europeans were not undividedly sincere themselves. In private—but only in private—they expressed forebodings about the zero option to the American government. Which left all domestic political heat concentrated on the American government.

The German, like the French language, uses the same word to refer to both policy and

54

politics. Clausewitz clearly meant that war was a continuation of *policy* by other means. On the other hand, arms control tends to become a continuation of domestic politics by other means.

Reykjavik and its aftermath suddenly seemed to the Europeans to make some form of agreement eliminating US and Soviet intermediate range missiles from Europe inevitable and even imminent. Then, like the character in the fairy tale who found his greatest disaster came from being granted his wish, many West Europeans and some Americans reacted in panic. Would taking the American landbased intermediate range missiles out of Europe "decouple" the United States from Western Europe? If it did, could the French and British independent national strike forces—whose least vulnerable part is based at sea—replace the American guarantee?

President Mitterrand and Prime Minister Thatcher issued a statement indicating that they would resist any Soviet or American attempt to include the elimination of the French and British strike forces in the deal. But the argument for keeping them out is based on the fact that they are purely national forces having nothing to do with Nato. France and Britain threaten to use them only as a last resort, in response to an attack destroying France or Britain respectively. Moreover since they are relatively small nuclear forces today, directed solely at destroying concentrations of civilians in or around Moscow or the like, their use would be credible at most as a "dying sting" in the event that French and British civil societies had already been destroyed by the disarming attack. That, however, makes them peculiarly unfit to deter or respond to an attack on third parties—a nuclear attack, for example, on the Federal Republic or Norway or Turkey. The grounds advanced for removing them from

U.S./Soviet negotiations on INF would remove them also from the defense of other European nations in Nato. The debate characteristically slides over the fact that Western Europe itself is not a nation and is unlikely to be in the relevant future. But, as we have seen, these independent national strike forces, as presently constituted, could only be used suicidally in response to an attack destroying France or Britain. They could not be used responsibly even in answer to precise selective attacks on military forces in France or Britain, as long as civil society was left essentially intact.

While it is quite arbitrary to restrict the range of American missiles based on land in Europe (in the 1960s we had intermediate range ballistic and cruise missiles in Europe), it is not the range or the basing on land of our missiles which assures, or makes likely, their use in response to a Soviet attack on Europe. Their use has much more to do with their ability to survive attack through various active and passive defense measures, and especially with their ability to be used selectively for some political military purpose—that is, in a non-suicidal way. Among the most deplorable confusions in the debate has been the casual assumption that any use we might make of nuclear weapons would amount to "national suicide"; and, to compound the confusion, that we might do that "automatically" simply because our missiles were based on land in Europe and might otherwise be overrun.

The excited discussion of the zero option has revealed little about the requirements imposed on one or another ally in order to guarantee the security of other allies. It reveals much about how the peculiar upside-down arms control process associated with the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction has become part of the problem which it pretends to solve. And a great deal about the persistent incoherence of the debate on strategy.

## Notes

1. Winston Churchill, *The Gathering Storm*, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948) pp. 71-72.

2. Alan Bullock, *Hitler, A Study in Tyranny*. (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) passim.

3. Churchill, *op. cit.*, pp. 72-73.

4. Federal Defense Minister Manfred Woerner, as reported on Hamburg DPA (Deutsche Press Agentur), 30 November 1984. Compare the article by State Secretary, Federal Defense Ministry, Lothar Ruehl, *Frankfurter All-

Swords without Shields 55

gemeine, 26 April 1984. "German defense policy within the North Atlantic alliance has always interpreted the English term of 'forward defense' as 'defense up ahead', to make it clear that his defense is not supposed to reach forward into foreign territory and that the battle must not be carried to the territory of the aggressor from the outset."

5. "Don't Hit Me, I Can't Hit Back," *The Economist*, September 20, 1986, p. 54.

6. See "Preventing War in the Atomic Age—Towards a New Strategy for NATO—Resolution adopted by the Social Democratic Party of Germany's Party Conference" (Essen, May 17–21, 1984).

7. John Newhouse, *Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT*, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973) p. 176.

8. A.J. Wohlstetter, R.J. Lutz and H.S. Rowen, *Selection of Strategic Base Systems*, March 1953, Rand Corporation R-244S; Wohlstetter, F.S. Hoffman, Lutz and Rowen, *Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases*, April 2, 1954 Rand R-266; Wohlstetter, Hoffman and Rowen, "Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950s and 60s," September 1, 1956, Rand R-290; Wohlstetter and Rowen, "Objectives of the United States Military Posture," May 1, 1959, Rand RM2373.

9. Cited by Alain Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, *How Much is Enough?*, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 175 ff.

10. Stanley Hoffman, "Réponse á Albert Wohlstetter", in "Moralité et Efficacité de l'Arme Nucléaire," *Commentaire*, Spring, 1986. Tr. from the French "le mirage d'une guerre technologique, 'propre', sans bavures."

11. See Stanley Hoffman, *op. cit.*

12. During the ABM debate, Richard Garwin revived the idea of making the launching of ICBMs largely automatic on the basis of electromagnetic indications. See his letter to the *New York Times*, Oct. 22, 1967. He has elaborated the idea many times since.

13. See Albert Wohlstetter, "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?," *Foreign Policy*, No. 15, Summer 1974; "Rivals, But No 'Race'," No. 16, Fall 1974 and "Optimal Ways to Confuse Ourselves," No. 20, Fall 1975.

14. David Packard, "An Interim Report to the President," February 28, 1986; "A Formula for Action," April 1986; "National Security Planning and Budgeting," June 1986; *A Quest for Excellence*, Final Report to the President, June 1986.

15. Herbert York, "Controlling the Qualitative Arms Race," *Scientific American*, 222, No. 1 (January 1970), p. 27.

16. Paul Doty, Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 12 September 1974. *Detente: Hearings in U.S. Relations with Communist Countries*, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington D.C.: USGPO 1975).

17. Harvey Brooks, "The Military Innovation System and the Qualitative Arms Race," revised draft, distributed at Aspen Conference on Arms Control, August 1974.

18. For evidence for the statements in this paragraph, see Albert Wohlstetter, "Between an Unfree World and None: Increasing Our Choices," *Foreign Affairs*, Summer 1985.

19. Paul Baran, "On Distributed Communications," RAND Corporation Research Memorandum B265, August 13, 1961.

20. Lawrence G. Roberts, "The Evolution of Packet Switching," Chapter 2–1 in *Satellites, Packets, and Distributed Telecommunications*, Roy Daniel Rosner, Editor. Lifetime Learning Publications, Belmont, California, 1984, p. 111.

21. J.C. Nolen, et al, *U.S. Antitactical Ballistic Missile Defenses*, Institute for Defense Analysis, Paper P-1175, January 1976, pp. 29–34.

22. See Abram Chayes, "An Inquiry into the Workings of Arms Control Agreements", *Harvard Law Review*, Vol. 85, No. 5, March 1972.

23. For an analysis of the professional quality of the debate as it touched on the prospects for Minuteman surviving without active defense, see "Guidelines for the Practice of Operations Research" in *Operations Research*, The Journal of the Operations Research Society of America, Vol. 19, Number 5, September 1971.

24. The Union of Concerned Scientists, *Space-Based Missile Defense*, Cambridge, March 1984.

25. UCS Press Release dated 21 March 1984.

26. Gregory Canavan, *Correspondence on the OTA*

56

*Report on Missile Defense in Space*, Los Alamos National Laboratory P/AC:85-10, January 21, 1985.

27. "Space-Based Ballistic-Missile Defense," *Scientific American*, October 1984, p. 4.

28. Robert Jastrow has made familiar the sequence of errors by the Union of Concerned Scientists in "The War on Star Wars," *Commentary*, December 1984.

29. Brian Chow and Jon Arenberg, "A Linear Programming Model of Space-Based Laser Platforms for Intercepting Ballistic Missiles," Pan Heuristics, Marina del Rey, California, 1986, manuscript in possession of the authors.

30. Carl Sagan, *The Cold and the Dark*, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1984, p. 37.

31. Ibid, p. 106.

32. Hans Bethe, Richard Garwin, Carl Sagan, et al, *Space-Based Missile Defense*, Cambridge: Union of Concerned Scientists, March 1984, p. 81.

33. "The Strategic Defense Initiative: Defense Technologies Study," U.S. Department of Defense, April, 1984, in Official Documents of *The Star Wars Controversy*, eds. Steven E. Miller and Steven Van Evera, Princeton University Press, 1986, p. 304.

34. Hubertus G. Hoffmann, "A Missile Defense for Europe?" *Strategic Review*, Vol. 12, Summer 1984.

35. The phrase is quoted in "Memorandum by the Secretary of State [Acheson]," Dec. 20, 1949, in *Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949*, Vol. I, *Atomic Energy*, p. 612. The full text of the report accepted in Paris in 1949 on the "Strategic Concept for the Integrated Defense of the North Atlantic Area" is reproduced in *Foreign Relations of the United States, Vol. IV*, *The North Atlantic Treaty Organization*. pp. 1ff.

36. "Memorandum of Conversation, by the Deputy Director of the Office of European Affairs (MacArthur)," Dec. 3, 1949, *Foreign Relations, 1949, Volume IV, North Atlantic Treaty Organization* (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office): pp. 356-7.

37. "Memorandum by the Secretary of State," *op cit*, p. 613. Dean Acheson's thoughtful memorandum, dictated shortly before the ratification of the Nato treaty, suggests both the long history of Western dependence on nuclear weapons and the early recognition by the founders of Nato that a continued predominant "reliance upon the atomic defensive shield" was likely to "prevent progress toward the substitutes." He asked, "Is it true that within 5-10 years the U.S.S.R. may be expected to have a stockpile of atomic weapons of sufficient size effectively to neutralize the present advantage which we possess and might this time be shortened if the U.S.S.R. developed a thermonuclear reaction? ... If this is so, would we be better off addressing ourselves now to finding substitutes for the defensive shield our atomic weapons are now giving our allies?" If not in 1949, then perhaps in 1987 we should be ready to think about how to supplement the atomic shield to deter or repel a conventional invasion. Against a nuclear attack there is no substitute for a usable nuclear force.

38. Herman Kahn, *On Thermonuclear War*, Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 141.

39. For the outlines of unilaterally enforced multilateral arrangements to help meet grave threats to satellites such as space mines, see Albert Wohlstetter and Brian Chow, "Arms Control that Could Work", *The Wall Street Journal*, July 17, 1985 and *Self-Defense Zones in Space* PAN Heuristics Report, July 1986.

Swords without Shields 57

MAY 29 1987

May 21, 1987

INTEGRATED LONG-TERM STRATEGY PROJECT
CALENDAR OF EVENTS

| Date | Meeting | Place |
|---|---|---|
| June 2, 1987<br>(4:pm-5:00pm) | Future Security<br>Environment Working<br>Group - Speaker<br>Timothy Stanley &<br>John Ellison - Defense<br>Industrial Base Issues<br>(By Invitation Only) | Room 3A930, The<br>Pentagon, Washington<br>DC |
| June 11, 1987<br>(9:00am-4:00pm) | Integrated Long-Term<br>Strategy Commission<br>(By Invitation Only) | Room 3E869, The<br>Pentagon, Washington,<br>DC |
| June 12, 1987<br>(9:00am-5:00pm) | Offense/Defense<br>Working Group | IDA, Room 305 North |
| June 17, 1987 | Regional Conflict<br>Working Group | To Be Determined |
| July 7-8, 1987 | Offense/Defense<br>Working Group | IDA (Exact Location<br>To Be Determined) |
| July 28-29, 1987 | Offense/Defense<br>Working Group | IDA (Exact Location<br>To Be Determined) |
| August 14, 1987 | Offense/Defense<br>Working Group | IDA (Exact Location<br>To Be Determined) |
| August 20-28,<br>1987 | Nine-day extended<br>meeting of project<br>principals to work<br>on project report<br>(By Invitation Only) | Naval Ocean Systems<br>Command (NOSC), San<br>Diego, California |
| September 10,<br>1987 | Regional Conflict<br>Working Group | To Be Determined |
| Late September | Integrated Long-Term<br>Strategy Commission<br>(By Invitation Only) | Old Executive Office<br>Building, Washington,<br>DC |
| Early November | Integrated Long-Term<br>Strategy Commission | The Pentagon,<br>Washington, DC |

WASHINGTON, D. C. 20301-2000

5 MAY 1987

POLICY

MAY - 7 1987

Dear Henry:

As you know, we will hold a Summer Study in San Diego to work on the completion and integration of the various research efforts that assist our Commission. The session will begin Thursday, August 20, and end at noon on Friday, August 28. We have comfortable working space arranged at the Naval Ocean Systems Center. The chairmen of our Working Groups will participate for the duration of the Summer Study, and other key contributors and experts will be there as well.

Several Commissioners expressed interest in joining the San Diego session, at least for part of the time. Albert and I hope that you, too, can participate for several days during the August 20th to 28th period. Once we know the days that would be convenient for you, we can schedule working sessions and briefings of special interest to you. For those leaving in the evening on August 19th from Washington, we expect to have a dedicated aircraft.

Let me know if Colonel Rosenkranz of my office may start planning for your participation.

As a separate matter, I am enclosing a draft outline of the key issues to be addressed in the Executive Summary of our final report. The list incorporates the suggestions made during the Executive Session at our meeting last week; but it is, of course, still tentative, to be revised further as our work progresses. The Final Report, as we discussed, might consist of several brief volumes, in addition to the Executive Summary. These volumes would reflect the areas addressed by the Working Groups. Our June 11 meeting and the San Diego session will provide an opportunity to address all these elements of our final report.

Enclosure

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

5-5-87

The Commission's Final Report:

KEY TOPICS FOR THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Commission's final report might take the following form:

- Executive Summary, unclassified, some 40 pages.

- Some four to six brief volumes (classified, as required, and perhaps with appendices) to deal with each of the major areas that the Commission addressed.

The Commission discussed and revised an outline for the Executive Summary at its April 30th meeting. This preliminary outline is presented below for further review and suggestions by the Commissioners:

I. **Introduction and Overview** (1 to 2 pp)

II. **The Changing Security Environment** (2 - 5 pp)

III. **Thematic Recommendations**

A. **Strategic Doctrine.**

(1) **The offense-defense symbiosis.** The need for a better balance (in nuclear, chemical and conventional forces) between offensive and defensive systems and strategies for their use.

(2) **How much emphasis on prompt, comprehensive destruction?** The relative weight we should assign to preparations for inflicting prompt, comprehensive destruction vs. selective response that not only could end the war in our favor, but might moderate the outcome enough to serve the national interest. The changing significance of a capability promptly to destroy many hard targets. Threats to C³I (decapitation?) from comprehensive attacks.

(3) **The limited role of the threat of mutural destruction.** The contradictions and limitations of relying on suicidal threats. The problems of MAD and the needed long-term adjustments in NATO's "flexible response".

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

2

## B. Geopolitical Requirements.

(1) Competing resource requirements. Principles for the allocation of defense resources and for the design of forces to cope with competing requirements:

- Different likelihood of various wartime contingencies and their potential danger (e.g. low intensity conflicts vs. large scale nuclear war).

- Defense of different geographic regions (Central Europe, South West Asia, Central America etc.). Forward-basings vs. CONUS basing.

- The defense of interests in various geographic regions, including those in Eurasia where US and SU forces may become engaged (NATO's center, NATO's flanks, Southwest Asia) and those outside of the Eurasian periphery such as the Southeastern littoral of the Mediterranean and Central America. The strategic connection among some of these regions and the need to consider where US forces are based for various plausible contingencies and timely use, as well as their usefulness in a "global" contingency involving many regions. The importance of providing for responses to ambiguous warning that could be repeated.

(2) The need for allies. Key elements of our security policy today were created 35 to 40 years ago; but at that time the US position in the world was far stronger--relative to the Soviet Union, to our allies, and to non-aligned nations. Allies, hence, are more important. Indeed, Soviet threats against some regions beyond our borders would be critical for U.S. security even if we did not have alliance commitments in these regions. Changes in Alliance strategy are needed in response to the changing configuration of relative power, the changing state of the art of offense and defense, and the profound difficulties with current strategy.

## C. The Role of Technology.

(1) The technological competition. The technological competition with the Soviet Union and the need for the U. S. to clarify the political and military goals of innovation if we are to overcome the present slowness in fielding militarily useful technologies.

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

3

(2) **Congressional Support for Technological Innovation.**
The need, if we are to get sustained Congressional support for the necessary innovations, for making clear that the US-Soviet arms competition is not and has not been "an exponential arms race" driven by U.S. innovation, and that our production and deployment of actual systems (as distinct from research) has been lagging. Congressional constraints on testing can slow or stop innovations in defense of our satellites, in active defense in general, in precise and discriminate offense and in the development of more selective and safer nuclear munitions.

D. **Influencing the Soviet Union** [tentative]

(1) **Arms Control**

(2) **Changes in Soviet Strategic Doctrine** (US-Soviet interaction).

IV. **Programmatic Recommendations**

A. Military systems that must be given more realistic wartime capabilities:
- We need to focus our attention on getting a wide variety of sensors, fusion and assessment centers, communications and command that can serve to direct our forces throughout an extended conventional or a selective nuclear conflict.

- Our military space assets in particular, were developed as a peacetime means for acquiring strategic intelligence, monitoring arms agreements, managing our peacetime forces, and providing warning in the transition to war. Even for these peacetime purposes our space assets are excessively concentrated with a few critical nodes vulnerable to random mishaps, and they have little capability in crises. As gap fillers and for improved crisis capability but especially, for a robust capability in wartime, we need satellites, ground control and launch facilities which are more distributed, better able to survive and/or be reconstituted.

B. Long-range offensive and defensive systems: recommendations on basing, munitions, guidance.

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

4

C. Better exploitation of new technologies for precision targeting.

D. The NATO preparations to exploit weaknesses within the Soviet block in the event of war. (Measures for enlisting East European population in support of favorable war termination.)

E. Specific capabilities designed for low intensity conflicts including improved technologies for training indigenous forces allied with us and greater exploitation of the information technologies to devise appropriate weapons that discriminate between military and civilian targets and reduce the exposure of pilots or other personnel to attrition or capture.

F. Approaches and programs for supporting anti-Communist insurgencies (covert action and other support). [Tentative]

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

26 FEB 1987

MAR - 3 1987

Dear Henry:

As we discussed at our Plenary meeting on February 20th, we will seek to schedule two more plenary meetings before summer, one in April and one in the first part of June. The April (or early May) meeting will be held in the Old Executive Office Building.

We would like to find the most convenient meeting dates for Commission members by coordinating dates as we did the last time. Please indicate on the enclosures which dates are *not* convenient, and have the enclosures returned to my office.

From 20 to 28 August 1987 the working group chairmen and other principals will gather in San Diego to synthesize the project research and develop material to support the Commission. As I mentioned at last Friday's meeting, we hope that Commission members will have an opportunity to join the San Diego meetings for a day or so. We will make whatever arrangements are necessary to accommodate your visit.

We also discussed on the 20th the remaining Commission meetings after the summer. As we envisaged, we might hold a one-day meeting in September and perhaps a two-day meeting late in November, with our final report still scheduled for December.

Thank you for your cooperation in having the enclosed forms returned as soon as possible.

Enclosures
Meeting Dates Forms
Self-Addressed Envelope