Washington did not expect its nuclear monopoly to end so quickly. Truman called for a study of the implications of the August 1949 Soviet test. The
Resulting paper, NSC 68 ("United States Objectives and Programs for National Security”), warned that within four or five years the Soviet Union would be able to launch a surprise nuclear attack on the United States and called for a rapid buildup of air, ground, and sea forces, and of nuclear forces too.603 This recommendation seemed unrealistic when NSC 68 was submitted in April 1950, but it gained a new relevance when the Korean War broke out in June. The United States and Britain began major rearmament programs, and NATO committed itself to ambitious force levels.
The economic impact of these programs soon caused concern. The British Chiefs of Staff argued in the spring of 1952 that the primary deterrent against Soviet aggression should be provided not by expensive conventional forces, but by the threat of nuclear retaliation. Eisenhower took the view that the federal budget - including the defense budget, which had grown threefold between 1950 and 1953 - had reached the point where it was damaging the economy. His "New Look” national security policy, which was set out in NSC 162/2 ("Basic National Security Policy”) and adopted on October 30, 1953, aimed to reduce the defense burden. Its most striking innovation was the emphasis it placed on nuclear weapons: "in the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions.”604 The United States would rely on the threat ofnuclear retaliation to deter large-scale aggression by the Soviet Union. Any major war with the Soviet Union would be a nuclear war.
NSC 162/2 took a more sanguine view of the Soviet threat than NSC 68 had done. It backed away from the idea of an imminent year of maximum danger. The Soviet Union, it argued, was unlikely to launch a general war against the United States in the near future, and it foresaw the time when the two countries would have so many nuclear weapons that there would be "a stalemate, with both sides reluctant to initiate general warfare.”605 The main challenge was rivalry "over the long pull”; that was why economic strength was so impor-tant.606 NSC 162/2 argued that local aggression by the Communist powers could be inhibited by the threat of a nuclear response, even though that threat would become less effective as Soviet nuclear forces grew.
Nuclear deterrence was now the organizing principle of US national security policy. Eisenhower rejected the idea of preventive war against the Soviet
Union, which seemed to some senior officers to be a realistic option in the early 1950s; "there are all sorts of reasons, moral and political and everything else, against this theory," he told a press conference in 1954.607 He expedited the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), as well as reconnaissance satellites. He deployed tactical nuclear weapons to Europe and other theaters. The basic Cold War structure of US nuclear forces took shape during his presidency.
Eisenhower’s New Look policy was widely criticized in the United States for lacking credibility against all but the most extreme threats. The United States, in the eyes of the critics, would have to respond to limited aggression by choosing between doing nothing and starting a general war. Credibility was understood to be essential for deterrence, and the problem of making credible threats came to occupy a central place in theoretical analyses of deterrence and in discussions of US national security policy. It was a particular problem for NATO as Soviet nuclear forces grew: was it credible for the United States, once it became vulnerable to Soviet nuclear strikes, to threaten to use nuclear weapons to defend its allies?
Soviet policy after Stalin’s death in March 1953 ran parallel to American policy in some key respects. The Soviet Union cut back the conventional forces that it too had built up in the early 1950s. It placed increasing emphasis on nuclear weapons and on ballistic missiles as the means to deliver them; in December 1959, it created a new military service, the Strategic Rocket Forces, which now became the spearhead of Soviet military power. The post-Stalin leaders moved away from the idea of an imminent year of maximum danger, which Stalin had adopted in the early 1950s. The concept of "peaceful coexistence," which suggested that war could be postponed indefinitely, was the Soviet equivalent of Eisenhower’s rivalry "over the long pull." Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), attacked Malenkov for his statement that a new world war would mean the end ofworld civilization, but he did declare, at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, that war was no longer fatally inevitable, because the Soviet Union now had the means to prevent it.608
The Soviet Union was very secretive about its armed forces, and overstated rather than underplayed its military power. In the absence of firm information, exaggerated fears erupted in Washington, reinforced by bureaucratic interests. There was a "bomber gap" scare in 1955 when air force intelligence
Predicted that the Soviet Union would soon have far more bombers than the United States. A second scare, the "missile gap," was triggered by the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, which demonstrated that the Soviet Union could deliver a warhead on an intercontinental trajectory. Khrushchev added to American anxieties by bragging about Soviet superiority.
Eisenhower did not share the prevailing sense ofalarm. He was skeptical of the claim that the Soviet Union was rapidly overtaking the United States. He knew that the photographs obtained by the U-2 spy plane, incomplete though their coverage was, showed no evidence of a rapidly growing Soviet ICBM force. The missile gap was laid to rest only when John F. Kennedy, who had criticized Eisenhower for complacency in the face of mortal danger, became president. By the summer of 1961, it was clear from satellite photographs that whatever gap existed was in favor of the United States.
Throughout this period the United States maintained a considerable superiority in nuclear forces. Between 1950 and 1962, the US nuclear stockpile grew from 369 weapons to over 27,000, while the Soviet stockpile grew from a handful of bombs to about 3,300. The American capacity to deliver nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union was much greater than the Soviet capacity to launch nuclear strikes against the United States. The United States had many more long-range bombers than the Soviet Union, and it also had bases close to the Soviet Union, in Europe, Asia, and North Africa, as well as forward-deployed aircraft carriers. The Soviet Union had no aircraft carriers and no bases close to the United States. For technical as well as strategic reasons, the Soviet Union focused first on the deployment of medium-range - rather than intercontinental - bombers and missiles that could strike the bases and carrier groups from which US forces could attack Soviet territory. In spite of the early Soviet lead in ICBM development, the United States moved forward more quickly with deployment. By 1962, the United States had 203 ICBMs and 144 SLBMs, compared with the Soviet Union’s 36 ICBMs and 72 SLBMs.609
By 1960, the United States and the Soviet Union had an image of a future war that was very different from the one they had shared in 1950.610 First, each side conceived of a nuclear war as starting with a full-scale strategic nuclear
Attack against a mix of targets. In each case, the most urgent targets would be the other side’s strategic nuclear forces, but centers of military and government control, as well as industrial and transportation centers, would also be attacked. Second, each side aimed to win. Marshal V. D. Sokolovskii, chief of the General Staff, declared in 1960 that World War III would inevitably end in the victory of Communism. He did, however, assert his military professionalism by emphasizing that victory had to be prepared for and would not come by itself.611 General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the JCS, assured Kennedy in 1961 that execution of the SIOP (the Single Integrated Operational Plan) "should permit the United States to prevail in the event of general nuclear war."612
Third, each side feared a surprise attack by the other. That fear was compounded by memories of the German attack on the Soviet Union and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Each side regarded it as essential to be able to preempt such an attack. In the 1950s, each side had a strong incentive to preempt by striking first. The United States might have been able to destroy a large part of the Soviet strategic force, thereby reducing the impact of a Soviet retaliatory strike. The Soviet Union, by the same token, could have lost a great part of its strategic force if it failed to go first; preemption, on the other hand, would allow it to blunt an American attack by destroying US forward-based systems.
Some analysts worried that the "reciprocal fear of surprise attack" might create a spiral of anxiety and suspicion that would result in one side’s attacking for fear that the other was about to do so, but that did not happen.613 Preemption would have been a difficult strategy to implement. It required accurate warning of an impending attack, and the danger of "going late" was counterbalanced by the danger of "going early," in the sense of starting an unnecessary and unwanted war. Moreover, neither side believed that it could escape retaliation if it launched the first strike.614 Even though each side regarded retaliation as a less desirable option than preemption, both sides tried to make sure they would be able to launch a retaliatory strike. Besides, the political leaders of the nuclear states believed that nuclear war would be a catastrophe, and each knew that the others
Year
3. US-USSR/Russian nuclear stockpile, 1945-2002.
Source: Www. nrdc. org/nuclear/nudb/dafigii. asp.
Knew that, and so on. That common knowledge served as a factor of restraint and reassurance at a time when the strategic balance offered incentives for preemption.
World History
