Chapter 1

      Nuclear Strategy, 1950–1990: The Search for Meaning

      Senator Glenn. I got lost in what is credible and not credible. This whole thing gets so incredible when you think about wiping out whole nations.

      Secretary Brown. That is why we sound a little crazy when we talk about it.

      —Defense Secretary Harold Brown and Senator John Glenn during U.S. Senate hearings, 1980

       “Weapons in Search of a Doctrine”

      Nuclear weapons, as Henry Kissinger often remarked during the Cold War, are weapons continually in search of a doctrine. The history of the evolution of nuclear strategy in the United States, as in the other nuclear powers, is a story of the ongoing attempt to find political meaning and military relevance in weapons so destructive that they defeat traditional notions about strategy and the use of force in international affairs. As early as 1946, the American strategic thinker Bernard Brodie wrote that nuclear weapons represented the “end of strategy,” since any attempt at strategic reasoning collapsed in the face of the twin facts that nuclear weapons existed and were unimaginably powerful.¹ The question that arose after the first detonation of a nuclear bomb in the summer of 1945 remains today: What do nuclear weapons actually do?

      Nearly seven decades later, there is still no American consensus on this question. Scholars, security analysts, civilian policymakers, and military leaders all continue to be divided over whether nuclear arms exist to fight wars, or to prevent wars—or whether the readiness to fight increases or decreases the likelihood of having to fight at all. In 1984, Robert Jervis, echoing Brodie, charged that a “rational strategy for the employment of nuclear weapons is a contradiction in terms. The enormous destructive power of these weapons creates insoluble problems,” and thus the history of nuclear strategy “has been a series of attempts to find a way out of this predicament and return to the simpler, more comforting pre-nuclear world.”² Other strategists during the Cold War rejected this kind of thinking as defeatism; Colin Gray wrote in a 1979 reflection on Brodie’s work that even in the most terrifying circumstances, there is still “a role for strategy—that is, for the sensible, politically directed application of military power in thermonuclear war.”³

      Those debates continue to the present day, but they cannot be understood without examining the Cold War efforts that preceded them. The world-destroying strategies conjured by the professional strategists, “the Wizards of Armageddon,” in Fred Kaplan’s famous phrase, are largely relics of the past, relegated to history by the generations who lived through the Cold War and regarded as curiosities by younger generations who did not.⁴ Nonetheless, the theories that animated the work of the Cold War strategists remain at the foundation of current thinking about nuclear issues.

       The 1950s: “At Times and Places of Our Own Choosing”

      For the first few years after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States did not have a nuclear “strategy” so much as it had a nuclear “problem.” American leaders had difficulty comprehending the enormity of their new super-weapon; while they saw the devastation visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these were relatively small, one-sided attacks that were retribution for a surprise attack, four years of war, and hundreds of thousands of U.S. casualties. The first two nuclear bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, inflicted a huge amount of destruction in moments, but the damage was still comparable to the ruin inflicted in slow-motion over weeks of relentless firebombing, and both of the afflicted Japanese cities still stand today.

      Within years of Japan’s defeat, however, nuclear delivery systems became more reliable and nuclear bombs became vastly more powerful. In short order, nuclear attack was no longer even remotely comparable to a strategic bombing campaign. Instead, policymakers had to think about the instant and complete destruction of dozens of major cities from long distances, a horrifying concept never before encountered in the study or practice of war.

      The essence of the American problem in this first decade after World War II was that unarguable nuclear superiority did not seem to buy very much security, especially in Europe. The newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization faced the conventional superiority of a Communist coalition that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Worse, the Western nuclear arsenal (Britain’s first bomb was detonated in 1952) did not seem to imbue the Soviet Union with any greater sense of caution: nuclear weapons did not thwart Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s gambles in Berlin, nor did they prevent the invasion of South Korea. The Americans and their allies, as Lawrence Freedman later wrote, felt they were “being forced into fighting the [Cold War] and would have to fight any future hot war according to ground rules laid down by the communists.”⁵ Years later, revelations from Soviet archives and interviews of former Soviet policymakers would show that the Soviets were in fact acutely conscious of the danger of war and particularly of nuclear war.⁶ But Stalin himself, bolstered by the crushing victory over the Nazis and the acquisition of a new European empire, was nonetheless willing to run significant risks even in the face of a nuclear near-monopoly.⁷

      The U.S. solution at the time was the strategy of “Massive Retaliation,” first described in a 1953 U.S. National Security Council paper and enunciated publicly a year later in more detail by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. President Dwight Eisenhower’s initial “New Look” at strategy affirmed that nuclear weapons would be essential to repulse a Soviet attack on the U.S. and NATO. Dulles went farther, and warned that the utility of nuclear arms extended beyond the battlefield: they could even act as a general strategic deterrent. That is, a U.S. nuclear attack on a grand scale—“Massive Retaliation”—against the USSR or its allies would henceforth be the price for any kind of Soviet or Communist-sponsored aggression, anywhere in the world.

      No longer would the Americans try to match the USSR man for man and pound for pound. Instead, Washington would try to exploit its nuclear superiority by using it to deter Soviet aggression. Moscow was put on notice that any major offenses (however they might be defined) by the USSR or its proxies against the Western allies would result in the United States exercising its “great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of [America’s] choosing.”⁸

      The Americans really had little choice at the time. Even with mass conscription or huge increases in defense spending, there was no way to fight the