CSIS: EXTENDED DETERRENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88T00528R000100100010-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 29
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 27, 2008
• Sequence Number: 10
• Publication Date: March 28, 1984
• Content Type: REPORT

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Center for Strategic & International Studies
Georgetown University ? Washington DC
March 28, 1984
Mr. Charles Waterman
National Intelligence Council
Room 7E47
Headquarters, CIA
Washington, D.C. 20502
Dear Mr~man:
This is to remind you that the next meeting of the European
Policy Group will convene Tuesday evening, 3 April, at 1830 in
the Abshire Room of the International Club. The agenda for the
meeting and introductory paper are enclosed.
We look forward to seeing you next Tuesday. %Lw G6~,r,,4 t74
European Policy Group
RSVP: 775-3234 or 3245
STAT
STAT
1800 K Street Northwest, Suite 400 ? Washington DC 20006 ? Telephone [phone]
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Center for Strategic & International Studies
Georgetown University ? Washington DC
EUROPEAN POLICY GROUP
Third Meeting
April 3, 1984
1830 Cocktails
1845 Introductory Remarks
"The Future of Extended
Nuclear Deterrence",
STAT
1930 Dinner
2015 General Discussion
2130 Close
1800 K Street Northwest, Suite 400 ? Washington DC 20006 ? Telephone [phone]
Cable Address: CENSTRAT TWX: 7108229583
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CSIS: EXTENDED DETERRENCE
March 28, 1984
Why is it "Extended" Deterrence
It is occasionally a useful exercise to think why we
use all those familiar adjectives in the jargon of strategy
-- what makes the strategy "countervailing"? To whom is the
destruction "assured"? Why must the capabilitiy be not merely
"hard-target" but also prompt? And, for present purposes, to
whom, or where, or against what is the deterence "extended"?
This is legitimately a three-fold question because, in
the jargon in question, the deterrence is "extended" in several
senses. First, and most obviously, it is extended nationally,
for it represents an effort by the United States to extend the
credibility of its nuclear power to the protection of other
nations -- most relevantly, the European NATO allies of the U.S.
It is a tribute to the continuing power of the national idea that
while there is considerable debate whether the United States
would, or should, or should be permitted to, use nuclear weapons
in the defense of, say, Germany, there is practically none about
whether the other 49 states would use such weapons for the
defense of Alaska.
Second, it is extended geographically. The locales
threats against which are to be discouraged are, for the most
STAT
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part, close to the Soviet Union and remote from the United
States. This fact that we seek to extend deterrence over great
distances has a significant political consequence: To the degree
that forces based in the United States are regarded as unsuitable
to carry out the threats implicit in geographically extended
deterrence, where are the forces that will be relied on to be
based and how, if at all, are the host countries to participate
in the decision to use the weapons?
Third, and most fundamentally, extended deterrence
purports to promise' nuclear retaliation not just for the gravest
challenges to the security and even existence of the United
States. It goes further, to threaten such retaliation -- or pre-
emption -- to discourage attacks that, while serious, pose, or
may be thought to pose, less ultimate threat to U.S. interests.
Indeed, the jargon betrays the problem. For to call
reliance on the ultimate threat of nuclear weapons to deter
attacks on America itself is deterrence simpliciter, while
denominating as only "extended" deterrence the making of such
threats to deter attacks on America's allies is to assert that
there are significant differences in the gravity to the U.S. of
the threat posed by such attacks. Such is undoubtedly the case
for some threats to some allies, and there are no doubt Americans
who would argue that it is case with regard to all threats to all
allies. But, at base successful deterrence, like a successful
alliance, depends on all concerned -- front-line allies, their
more remote partners, and potential attackers -- concluding that
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an attack on any part of the alliance is in fact a threat to
vital interests of the most powerful ally. In a fundamental
sense, the debate over extended deterrence is a debate over
collective security, over the degree to which it is literally
true, and not merely a pious Cold War formula that an attack on
one NATO ally is an attack on each.
Viewed in the light of several dimensions of its
extension, the problem of extended deterrence is simply the inter-
national and political form of the general problem of credibility
of retaliation with' potentially suicidal consequences against
threats that could fall short of fatal. The power of nuclear
weapons and the uncertainty of limiting their use are such that
only interests that are in the literal sense vital -- matters of
national or cultural existence -- will unquestionably be judged
sure to be defended by means that risk that existence. From this
perspective the debate over extension of American nuclear
deterrence to Europe finds its counterpart in debate over
American capacity to deter less than all out attacks on the U.S.
itself. The whole debate about the "window of vulnerability" and
the significance of the vulnerability of American ICBM silos
simply recasts the question of extended deterrence in a
nongeographical, non-national context. Just as threats of mutual
obliteration may be thought less than adequately credible to
deter attacks on America's allies in Europe and elsewhere, so
such threats may be thought less than adequate to deter limited
attacks on military forces in the United States itself.
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The Chronic Crisis of Extended Deterrence
A quick review of the history of the role of nuclear
weapons in NATO's strategic and political situation gives some
useful perspective on the current debate. There can be no doubt
that extended deterrence now-faces a crisis. There cannot,
however, be much doubt that extended deterrence has always been
in the throes of crisis.
The uneasy history of American nuclear guarantees to
its overseas allies has gone through several phases. Only in the
immediate post-war era, before the first Soviet atom bomb test,
have U.S. nuclear forces relative to those of the USSR matched
the theoretical requirements of high confidence extended
deterrence. For a brief period after the Second World War, the
Soviet Union lacked, and was believed by military and political
leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to lack, any serious
capability to attack the United States with nuclear weapons.
During that period, when fears of an imminent Soviet attack on
Western Europe were greater than they have been at any time
since, the U.S. threat to respond to such an attack with nuclear
weapons -- though it may well have fallen short in terms of
capability because of the limitations on the number and power of
the nuclear weapons the United States then possessed -- did not
lack for credibility.
That dominance was fleeting. By the early 1950s,
following the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons, the United
States government became acutely conscious of the strains
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inherent in relying on a threat to launch a general nuclear
attack on the Soviet Union as a response to a Soviet attack on
U.S. allies. The declaratory policy of massive retaliation then
espoused should in no way obscure the fact that during the
Eisenhower Administrations senior American leaders, importantly
including the President, had grave doubts about the prudence,
effectiveness, and even morality of relying on attacks on Soviet
cities and industry -- about all then-current weapons were
capable of -- as the primary means of preventing a Soviet assault
on Western Europe. 'Indeed, whatever the public simplifications
may have been, the doctrine of massive retaliation itself was not
a threat to level Moscow at the first sign of Soviet
obstreperousness, but rather a warning that future Soviet
aggression along the lines of Korea would find the United States
less ready than it had been in 1950 to let the Soviet Union and
its proxies define the geographical scope of the contest and the
character of weapons used.
The immediate reaction of the U.S. Administration and
of the NATO Alliance as a whole to doubts about general nuclear
war as a way of defending Europe was to focus on ways to use
nuclear weapons in ways that would be more effective militarily
and more credible politically. The concept of limited nuclear
war, and in particular of using smaller nuclear weapons for
militarily decisive intervention in battlefield operations was
the response.
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The turn to tactical nuclear weapons seems to have had
two sources. The first was technological. In the few short
years between 1945 and, say, 1954, the United States had gone
from an extreme shortfall of weapons relative to targets to a
position of nuclear plenty. Large numbers of smaller and far
more flexible nuclear weapons were now -- or would soon be
-- available. The second impetus was economic. The only
alternative, relying on conventional defense, was rejected as too
costly for an administration committed to fiscal retrenchment,
and politically too'troubling for a Europe still less than a
decade removed from the destruction of the second world war.
In a sense, TNF has never recovered from the enthusiasm
of its early days. Small, "clean" nuclear weapons deployed with
units in the field, not at air bases far in the rear, would carry
the burden of deterrence and, if necessary, defense. Just how
they would be decisive, especially once the Soviets could reply
in kind was never fully explained. For a period, however,
Western leaders publicly espoused the view (later attributed to
rigid Soviet artillery marshals) that nuclear weapons were just
big cannon. As Field Marshal Montgomery, then Deputy SAC Europe
blithely put it to a meeting in London in 1954,
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With us [at SHAPE] it is no longer: "They
may possibly be used." It is very definite-
ly: "They will be used, if we are attacked."
In fact, we have reached the point of no
return as regards the use of atomic and
thermonuclear weapons in a hot war.
NATO has spent the last 30 years returning to the very
question Montgomery was so sure was closed. For the period of
hearty confidence that the deployment of large numbers of
flexible, tactical nuclear weapons would solve NATO's deterrence
problems was remarkably short lived. It did not last even for
the time necessary to deploy the new weapons. A series of events
brought the doctrine into almost immediate disrepute. Probably
the two most important such events were leaked reports of the
1955 Carte Blanche exercise showing the massive German civilian
casualties that would accompany use of battlefield nuclear
weapons to defend Western Europe and Soviet testing in 1957 of an
intercontinental ballistic missile heralding an era (incorrectly
thought to be closer than it was) of absolute U.S. vulnerability.
One suspects, however, that the real problem. was that
Americans had hoped TNF would produce decisive battlefield
results at tolerable cost, while Europeans hoped they would set
off general escalation. Growing consciousness of what the
attempt could do to both partners prompted some quick rethinking.
The response to this crisis (like the response to
others) diverged into two schools. One sought to find a way to
make the use of nuclear weapons more credible by making it not
merely a step to mutual oblivion but a strategically meaningful
act -- this largely a response to American vulnerability if
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escalation went very far. The second sought a way to make use of
nuclear weapons unnecessary -- this approach a product of a
conviction that primarily, if not purely, conventional defense
was both necessary and possible.
Responses of the first sort included the political
effort to devise a nuclear capability that was less exclusively
American. This effort took a variety of forms ranging from
implementation of "dual key" systems, through proposals to
develop and deploy uniquely European nuclear forces under the
control of a new NATO structure. (It is unlikely to be entirely
coincidental that this was also the era of determined deployment
of British and French independent nuclear forces.)
From the American side, one important strain of the
response in nuclear doctrine to recognition of Soviet capability
against the United States was the articulation of a policy of
preparing relatively large-scale but still limited nuclear
targetting options. This policy sought to find a set of targets
that went beyond battlefield use (which had been recognized to be
principally destructive in very Western territory it was to
defend) and yet stopped short, and recognizably so, of massive
attacks on the Soviet homeland (now recognized as likely to bring
down an equivalent Soviet response on the U.S. and therefore of
limited credibility).
The second strain of the response to the emergence of
Soviet intercontinental forces and recognition of the terrible
cost of large-scale use of battlefield nuclear weapons in Europe
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was increased belief, in the United States at any rate, in the
possibility of a conventional defense of Europe. Reinforcing
this interest was the view that NATO had previously greatly
exaggerated the degree of Soviet conventional advantage and the
scale of NATO effort necessary to offset it.
None of these responses to the perceived difficulties
of heavy reliance on theater nuclear weapons for NATO deterrence
was outstandingly successful. Europeans greeted Sec. McNamara's
articulation in 1961 of a U.S. doctrine of controlled strategic
nuclear response not with enthusiasm but dismay. For they feared
-- or purported to fear -- an American scheme to limit nuclear
war to Europe. When it became clearer, as Soviet forces began to
match Soviet boasts, that no U.S. counterforce attacks could
destroy Soviet ability to retaliate against American cities and
industry, American enthusiasm for the idea declined as well.
The efforts to increase credibility by a larger
European role in nuclear attacks decisions took concrete form in
the MLF idea. That plan foundered on inability to reach a
workable scheme for European decision-making. A continent that,
for all its common heritage and shared interests, could not agree
on a supranational policy on the price of wine, barley and sheep
meat (unsurprisingly) found it hard to agree on how to decide on
nuclear war -- and eventually Lyndon Johnson lost patience with
the attempt.
The effort to build a much stronger conventional
capability fared little better. However attractive the idea was
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to specialists (mostly Americans) it petered out, despite the
problems on the nuclear side, as the immediate threat receded
with easing of the Berlin crisis and as the United States found
its military energies for conventional forces diverted to
Southeast Asia.
The decade of the '60s was not entirely unproductive in
shaking NATO's faith in a nuclear deus ex machina. By 1967, NATO
was prepared to adopt a new statement of its doctrine. The
policy of "flexible response," embodied in MC-14/3, proposed to
deter by having forces able to meet aggression at whatever level
of violence -- including nuclear weapons -- was necessary, while
seeking to contain the scope of the fighting. This was a clear
step beyond its predecessor of a decade before that had pledged
the Alliance to virtually immediate use of nuclear weapons.
The policy of flexible response has many critics and it
lacks intellectual elegance, but it does have some of the
important advantages of verbal compromise in a situation where
there are no easy ways to reconcile differences of interest and
difficulties of action. It preserves the commitment of U.S.
nuclear weapons and the uncertainty that must inspire in Soviet
calculations, while recognizing the inherent advantages of having
a conventional defense adequate at least to delay their use until
large-scale conventional defeat has made such attacks necessary.
But the compromise of 1967 by no means terminated the
argument. With unquestioned Soviet achievement of parity, with
U.S.-Soviet agreement on limited restriction on intercontinental
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strategic arms -- but not on theater systems, and with a variety
of new tensions in the European-U.S. relationship over economics,
Vietnam, oil and the Middle East debate continued over the
credibility and extent of the U.S. nuclear guarantee. The United
States by the Schlesinger doctrine and the countervailing
strategy sought to restore doctrinally (and attain operationally)
the concept of controlled strategic response articulated by
Secretary MacNamara in the early 1960s. Responding to European
concerns about an arms control deal being made over their heads
and to Soviet deployments indicating a continued interest in
being able to make strategic nuclear threats to Western Europe,
the Alliance agreed on deployment of Pershing Its and GLCMs while
simultaneously pressing negotiations to limit such deployment on
both sides. (The Alliance may not avoid repeating all its
history, but it does learn. The LRTNF debate proceeded in a
substantially more realistic political context than the MLF
debate.)
Challenges to Flexible Response
But none of these steps has stilled the controversy.
Distinguished American spokesmen have joined in questioning the
credibility of the U.S. making, not just a massive, but any
nuclear response, to a Soviet attack in Europe. In Europe even
more than in the United States concern has been aroused at
whether reliance on nuclear threats is worth risking the cost
making good on such threats would entail.
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So the Alliance is turning to a new phase in the
seemingly endless debate about extended deterrence. The general
directions of criticism of current policy may be summed up in
three questions:
1. Isn't there a nuclear alternative to current
concepts? Is there not a way to defeat or deter by imposing
unacceptable but less than total costs, some new way either
doctrinally or operationally to use nuclear weapons that will
ease the problems of credibility, effectiveness and destructive-
ness that have undermined past reliance on nuclear weapons?
2. Isn't there a conventional alternative? Is there
some way not to rely on nuclear weapons at all or at least not
very much, by creating a situation in which there is no need for
threats of nuclear escalation because NATO can defeat a Soviet
assault by direct conventional defense?
3. Isn't there some political way out, a way to avoid
relying on American nuclear weapons but to rely on European ones
instead. So far this possibility of a European deterrent remains
by far the least discussed of the three possibilities and, as
probably the most remote, it is not discussed further here. But
in the long run the outcome of persisting unassuaged doubts about
relying on American nuclear weapons could well be, not massive
European rallying to Alliance conventional defense, but growth in
European nuclear forces, with all the attendant political
problems of such forces.
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Nuclear Changes
Those who seek a different, but still nuclear, way of
working the problem have advanced a variety of proposals for
changing the weapons and nuclear doctrines on which NATO relies.
One element of this approach urges the need, in place
of heavy reliance on battlefield nuclear weapons, to plan to use
long-range nuclear weapons to disrupt, inhibit, and prevent the
massing and echeloning of Soviet forces well behind the front,
and to destroy the airbases, supply systems, and command and
control on which the Soviet onslaught would depend. Of course,
NATO has always maintained that it stands prepared to strike
behind the front line, but now this school of thought argues
that, with improved target acquisition capabilities, it becomes
possible to do a great deal more in this area. Because this
approach tends to focus on targets in Eastern Europe between the
Elbe and the Vistula it threatens to arouse all of the
traditional European fears about counting on fighting a nuclear
war in Europe only. Nor is it self evident that the Pact is
significantly more vulnerable to deep strike nuclear attacks than
NATO, if only because of NATO's heavy reliance on airpower (and
hence on airfields). Massive U.S. reinforcement of NATO's
conventional defense presents a variety of targets (airfields,
seaports, and POMCUS bases) for limited nuclear attack which are,
in their way, every bit as tempting as those Soviet tank
formations are.supposed to be for NATO.
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A second and related approach may be termed a policy of
"no early first use." Without renouncing nuclear escalation
altogether (or hoping to find the long-sought Grail of a
militarily decisive target set for nuclear weapons) it is argued
that NATO should take a series of steps to insure that such a
decision can be postponed as long as possible and made by
political, not military decision-makers. An important element in
this approach would pull NATO's nuclear weapons back, both
literally from the inner German border and figuratively from
immediate battlefield missions. The LRTNF decision fits con-
ceptually very well with this approach, for Pershing Its and
GLCMs are more survivable and are optimized for deep strikes.
Proponents of this view hold that, with that deployment
under way, NATO can and should substantially reduce its commit-
ment to use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield. To symbolize
that change in policy and to reduce pressures for early use of
nuclear weapons, NATO should, it is argued, retire many nuclear
weapons of dubious utility for long-withheld strikes (air defense
weapons and ADMs are usually mentioned in this context). Such
reduced numbers of artillery shells, short-range missiles as are
retained should be pulled well back from the frontier, while
dual-use aircraft are transferred back to the conventional
battle. The resulting NATO theater nuclear force would be
smaller and more survivable, and would embody a doctrine under
which nuclear attacks would be reserved (and would be confidently
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able to be so reserved) as a means of escalation after conven-
tional defenses failed, not a means to force the result.
In general, the thrust of efforts to ease the present
problems by changes in nuclear plans is to propose to shift the
nuclear attacks which NATO would threaten away from the battle-
front and toward the rear, away from the Federal Republic and its
borders with East Germany and back toward Soviet soil and to seek
relief from the pressures to use nuclear weapons early by surviv-
ability and disengagement of battlefield forces.
Conventional Changes
Often politically, if not conceptually, contrary to
these proposals to restructure NATO's nuclear reliance are
proposals to get far more serious about conventional defense.
Proposals for improving NATO conventional defense
exemplify, to varying degrees, the familiar (but not for that
reason necessarily false) arguments for such steps -- that the
conventional imbalance is greatly exaggerated, that technology or
public support or the inherent-advantages of the defense are on
NATO's side, that NATO already spends very nearly enough both in
money and manpower to mount a formidable conventional defense and
that for all these reasons conventional defense along conven-
tional lines is feasible and desirable.
The most orthodox version of this view maintains that
modestly greater efforts, modestly more cooperation, and modestly
improved weapons can produce quite large enhancements of NATO's
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non-nuclear capability. This view -- which may be called a
"conventional conventional" approach -- has been advanced with
logic, rigor, and conviction (and some measure of success) by
moderate Americans for years. Today it is exemplified by General
Rogers' call for NATO commitment to four percent increases in
defense spending and Bob Komer's plea for a more coalitional
approach to alliance defense.
A variety of observers have enlivened the conventional
force improvement lobby by suggesting that fundamental new
approaches to non-nuclear defense are feasible -- and probably
necessary. (Symptomatic of this approach, Neil Kinnock, the new
leader of the British Labor Party, stresses that while his party
would abjure nuclear threats (even perhaps in retaliation), the
alternative strategy on which it would rely, though certainly
"non-nuclear," would by no means be "conventional.")
Prominent in this category are those who argue that
"emerging technologies" offer ways to use the West's scientific
and technological skill to make up for the shortfalls in more
standard conventional forces that have created the present
imbalance, and that are likely to persist despite calls for
orthodox enhancements. In a sense, the proponents of emerging
technologies argue that technology can do for conventional
defense what battlefield nuclear weapons were supposed to have
done for nuclear defense when they were propounded in the 1950s,
namely apply Western skill and inventions, not unattainable
numbers, to render the Soviet armored juggernaut ineffective by
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high-efficiency, high-leverage attacks on the concentrations
which that strategy requires.
Other conventional changes have been advanced that do
not rely so much on new inventions as on new thinking and new
political attitudes. One is the argument that NATO's effective-
ness and its perceived seriousness in conventional defense could
be enhanced by the creation of large-scale physical barriers
along the inter-German border. Another, and by no means contra-
dictory view, argues that the time has come finally to abandon
any suggestion that'"forward defense" must be a static defense
and rely instead on tactics of maneuver and defense in depth. In
its extreme (but by no means self evidently unacceptable) form
this emphasis on new tactics includes an argument that NATO
should develop the capability to engage in counteroffensives into
Eastern European territory. This, it is argued, would frustrate
Soviet efforts to concentrate on areas of the front they select
and even, by threatening Soviet dominance of the satellites,
impose on the Soviets a potential political cost to war of long
duration. Other proponents of fundamental departures in the
conventional field are also heard, including those who call for a
massively increased reliance on reserves and mobilization and on
concepts of civilian defense.
It is at least possible that the growing controversy
about nuclear weapons in Europe has altered political landscape
of the debate over increased conventional defense. In the past,
European resistance to significantly increased emphasis on
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conventional defense was at least as much political as economic.
Conventional defense was seen not merely as costing more money,
but as, either literally or figuratively, allowing (or inviting)
the United States to leave Europe. With increasing recognition
of the potential costs and risks to Europe of excessive reliance
on nuclear weapons, Europeans, particularly those of the moderate
left, may be becoming more willing to recognize that they, even
more than the United States, have a self interest in a more
credible conventional defense.
Clearly, these proposals for improving conventional
defense offer considerable potential. Nonetheless, serious
problems remain with a largely or exclusively conventional
defense. The emerging technologies are still emerging; even if
only modest increases are required in budgets, they are not
necessarily going to be forthcoming; both barriers and maneuver
present political difficulties for West Germany and its already
strained politics of security.
Proposals for.stronger, even exclusively, conventional
defense fail, in too many instances, to confront how very great
the conventional defense problem is. Better conventional
defenses could discourage quick limited scale attacks intended to
obtain large gains cheaply (if,indeed the Soviets think such
attacks are feasible anyway). They could buy time and add
uncertainty. If, however, one sets the task as a conventional
defense good against a prolonged and determined Soviet assault,
one has to cope with the fact that whether or not the Soviets
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would be good at a blitzkreig, Russians have long been very-good
at attrition. Current official Soviet doctrine, in its quest for
the daring offensive breakthrough, is not an exemplification but
a repudiation of Russian history. Historically, Russia has won
wars by the gradual massing of numbers and by willingness to take
terrible losses until those masses can grind down a possibly more
sophisticated but less numerous or less determined foe. Quite
possibly, official Soviet enthusiasm for quick victories reflects
a judgment that in the long run the costs of being a modern
Kutuzov are too high, but NATO. can hardly afford to count on
that.
No First Use?
Accompanying some calls for greater conventional
efforts -- though by no means logically necessary to them -- are
proposals whereby NATO would pledge not to use nuclear weapons
first. Many advocates of such a "no first use" posture would
delay its declaration and implementation until there had been
substantial improvements in conventional forces, but there is a
strain in the no first use argument which suggests that the
pledge should precede rather than follow such improvements. For
it is argued that first use would be militarily ineffective, that
it is blatantly incredible, and that the threat to initiate the
use of nuclear weapons in the defense of Europe has come to
produce not solidarity but divisiveness in the Alliance. In any
case it is claimed that a threat to use nuclear weapons first
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perpetuates the myth that nuclear weapons are panacea for NATO's
problems and thereby encourages evasion of those non-nuclear
force improvements that are feasible and needed.
It is, however, extremely debatable whether a no first
use pledge would help in any way in the process of enhancing
either trans-Atlantic unity or conventional defense. The
commitment of nuclear weapons is a manifestation, and an
important one, of American solidarity with Europe. Revoking that
commitment pledge might or might 'not be believed by the Russians
-- or the European left -- but there is every reason to believe
it would gravely trouble Europeans who take the Alliance
seriously. In the record so far, there is no reason at all to
believe that an American no first use pledge would either so calm
European concerns about nuclear war as to foster a joint
commitment (joined in by the bulk of the nuclear opposition) to
vastly enhanced conventional defense.
Discussion of this issue should also cope with the
inherent arrogance of assuming that the question of first use is
essentially a subject for Western debate. Soviet.doctrine in
this as in all things is obscure, but there is a good deal of
sense to the notion that the Soviet Union regards the prompt
neutralizing of NATO's nuclear capability as its priority task in
any attack on Western Europe. The possibility that, to carry out
this mission, the Soviet Union would at a very early stage use
nuclear weapons if only against NATO's nuclear capabilities can
hardly be ignored.
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Alliance politics and Soviet plans aside, the tradi-
tional arguments for including an ultimate nuclear threat
continue-to have validity. Militarily, the possibility that the
Allies will use nuclear weapons against mass Soviet conventional
forces must impact on Soviet judgments as to the feasibility of
massing sufficiently for the conventional breakthrough their
doctrine requires. In time perhaps those concentrations will be
as vulnerable to conventional assault as to nuclear, but there is
little reason to believe that time has yet come.
Most fundamentally, it is hard to see how a no first
use pledge, if it is to any degree believed, could avoid reducing
Soviet uncertainty as to the consequences of aggression, and
thereby increasing their willingness to try. Moreover, the
possibility of first use plays a unique role in whatever hope
there may be of containing a war in Europe once started.
The Soviet Union, in deciding whether to embark on a
course of aggression that threatens NATO's vital interests -- the
freedom and independence of the democracies of the Alliance --
could not mistake NATO's capacity to deny them any fruits of
victory by using/ its nuclear arsenal.' They could only mistake
our will to use that capacity. The objective of deterrence is to
ensure that there is the minimum possible chance that they should
make that mistake.
We must, however, force ourselves to consider the possi-
bility that, under the pressure perhaps of some now unforeseeable
crisis internal or foreign, the Soviet leaders would, having
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persuaded themselves of a good chance of initial conventional
success, estimate -- or perhaps, misestimate -- as tolerably low
the chances of successful NATO conventional defense and the risk
of nuclear escalation, if that defense fails. So self-persuaded,
they might then launch an attack.
Thereafter, the point could come at which NATO's con-
ventional defenses began to fail. Then the Alliance would have
the greatest possible need for a means to convince the Soviet
Union, even in so disastrous a situation, that it had mistaken
NATO's resolve, that it should pull back and reassess the
prospects.
If.having failed in efforts to defeat the attack
directly, if the Alliance could not somehow force a Soviet
recomputation of likely losses against attainable gains, it would
be faced finally with only two awful choices. Those choices
would be acquiescence in Soviet military conquest or unleashing
the full power of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Each one of these
choices seems self evidently intolerable -- until the full and
true consequences of the other are taken into account.
The potential of limited nuclear attacks to force that
recalculation is, arguably, their chief contribution to
deterrence and the principal justification for maintaining the
capacity for the first use of nuclear weapons, and declaring the
willingness, to undertake it. For such attacks -- whatever their
direct military effect (and that effect could be substantial,
though far from decisive in a traditional military sense) --
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23 -
would serve to show to the Soviets in the most direct and con-
crete way possible that the West, and specifically the United
States, was in fact prepared to use the means that it had to
prevent an end it could not tolerate.
No one can responsibly be confident that such an effort
to compel restraint and retreat would be successful. The
confusion, even hysteria, that would follow (and indeed precede)
such an attack might well drive both sides further and further
toward the abyss, not persuade them to draw back. But there is a
chance -- and some would rate it a high chance -- that faced with
absolute proof of NATO's will to use nuclear weapons by their
actual use on a limited scale, the Soviet Union would pull back
and terminate the war on terms acceptable to the West.
That is a chance worth retaining, and if only for that
reason, a no first use pledge is a bad idea.
A Five-Point Program
To say, however, that NATO should not abandon the
possibility of initiating the use of nuclear weapons and that the
basic policy of flexible response remains an appropriate one, is
by no means to say that there should be no changes in Western
tactical and theater nuclear weapon deployments, plans, and
doctrines. In addition to pressing for whatever can be done to
increase conventional capability, the following measures should
be implemented in consultation with all the. NATO allies:
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-- Significant numbers of the U.S. tactical nuclear
weapons in Europe are for the obsolescent Nike-Hurcles defense
missiles and for ADMs. These amount to almost 20% of the total.
(See table attached.) Neither system is politically workable or
militarily effective. In particular, reliance on ADMs should be
replaced by efforts to secure agreement to the construction of
significant passive barriers along the inner-German border.
Removal of these weapons, in addition to whatever symbolic value
it would have, would free for more useful military tasks the
personnel and facilities needed for their storage and protection.'
-- A role remains for battlefield nuclear weapons,
but they should be pulled back significantly from the frontier.
This would reduce pressures (or perceptions that there would be
such pressures) for unnecessarily early release or delegation of
authority to use such weapons. Obviously, Soviet proposals to
create a "nuclear free zone" embracing virtually the whole of the
Federal Republic are unacceptable, but there is a serious
political or military case for pulling the battlefield weapons
back far enough to give reasonable confidence that their advanced
presence would not become a complication rather than a help in
the event of attack. Concommitantly, NATO should increase the
survivability of the command and control structure necessary for
decisions on and imployment of theater nuclear weapons.
Except for the Pershing Its and ground-launched
cruise missiles now being deployed, most NATO theater nuclear
weapons are '60s vintage. Clearly, improvements and
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- 25 -
modernization will be required, although the inherent contro-
versiality of any such measures has made Western European
governments unusually skittish on the subject. The focus of
modernization should be on survivable, dedicated, relatively long-
range systems. They should be survivable (which includes reduced
reliance on air bases) to faciliate a policy of insuring that the
decision to use nuclear weapons could be delayed until it was
clear that such use was necessary to forestall conventional
collapse, and not accelerated out of a fear of Soviet premption.
They should be dedicated, i.e., not dual capable, to avoid the
political, arms control, and most important, military complica-
tions of forces being withheld or diverted for nuclear roles when
they could make a crucial contribution to conventional defense.
They should be relatively long-range so they could be used in
strikes whose military objective, apart from demonstrating NATO
resolve, would be to disrupt the Soviet rear not affect the
immediate battle, which would, by hypothesis, be taking place on
the West side of the inner-German border.
-- Finally, within the policy of flexible response,
NATO should move toward the formal articulation of a policy of
enhancing its conventional capability and configuring its nuclear
capability so as to make clear that the decision to use nuclear
weapons would be able to be deferred for a significant time.
While NATO should formally reserve all its options, including
battlefield use, declaratory policy should explicitly embrace the
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26 -
concept that initial use might be directed well behind the
battlefront, and even onto Soviet territory.
In an ultimate sense, however, the credibility of
extended deterrence depends not on the details of forces or
doctrine even with respect to so fundamental a question as no
first use, but on the basic recognition that extending America's
nuclear commitments to Europe does not, in fact, really involve
the attempt to push nuclear deterrence beyond the limits of truly
vital American interests. The United States is committed to the
security and integrity of Western Europe not because the indepen-
dence of Western Europe from Soviet domination serve European
interests but because it is vital to the independence of the
United States. Only as long as that proposition is both true and
perceived to be true can extended deterrence work, and as long as
it is so perceived, extended deterrence can continue to work.
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w V
THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1983
Surface-to-surface guided missile designed to provide general battlefield fire
support for an Army corps.
Honest John missile 100 200
Simple surface-to-surface free-flight rocket that has the accuracy of standard
artillery. Being replaced by Lance missile.
Defensive:
Nike Hercules missile 55
Surface-to-air guided missile.
Atomic land mines 215
The U.S. Nuclear Stockpile
Approximate numbers of warheads for medium- and short-range arms.
ar.
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i
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'
' I '!: !!ii! ~i,ll nl
~
~~
~
~
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~'
1
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~
~
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'
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!
ii
n
l
~!
, ;
:Im
nl(4
i!
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l
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ld
t 1(r
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U.S.
..,,
411
f
iii
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f ' 1
U.S. forces ?
In Europe f
! I
Ul,~1
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r
ti
,
NATO
orces
(!I ! Irll I r
jl ?
i
1
Pacific
Medium-Range:
Aerial bombs
1,210
1,415
320
135
Pershing I missile
195
100
Short-Range:
8-inch
artillery rounds -
200
505
430 ?
85
155-mm. -
1
artillery rounds
160
595
- 140
30
Lance missile
210
325
370
Aerial bombs
720
Depth bombs
560,
45
Terrier missile
- 155
135
Surface-to-air antiaircraft missile for shipboard use.
Asroc antisubmarine
weapon 225 350
All-weather, day or night, ship-launched ballisticjnissile aboard destroyers and
some cruisers and frigates.
-Subroc antisubmarine -
weapon 110 175.
Submarine4aunched missile.:
Source: Defence Department
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