ABSTRACT
In August 1980 President Carter signed Presidential Directive 59, which postulates the possibility that the Soviet Union has a war-fighting, war-winning nuclear strategy and orders steps to protect the United States against it. The predisposition of the American strategic community is to shrug off the fundamental doctrinal discrepancy. American doctrine has been and continues to be formulated and implemented by and large without reference to its Soviet counterpart. American and Soviet nuclear doctrines, it needs stating at the outset, are starkly at odds. Reliance on the nuclear deterrent became more imperative than ever after the conclusion of the Korean war, in the course of which US defense expenditures had been sharply driven up. In an address to the United Nations in December 1953, Eisenhower argued that since there was no defense against nuclear weapons, war between the two “atomic colossi” would leave no victors and probably cause the demise of civilization.
