Conclusion

The beginning of the nuclear age in 1945, with the climactic attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought World War II to an end, was fraught with uncertainty. These weapons of unprecedented destructive power seemed to promise eventual doomsday for any countries toward which they were directed. With the deployment of long-range ballistic missiles in addition to aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons across continents, it appeared to pessimists that Armageddon had jumped from the pages of Scripture and onto the agenda of policy makers and commanders. Two things that nuclear pessimists feared during the Cold War, which coincided more or less with the first nuclear age, did not happen. No nuclear weapon was fired in anger after the U.S. attack on Nagasaki. And nuclear weapons did not spread across the planet as fast as doomsayers had predicted. Instead of some twenty or thirty states with nuclear weapons by the end of the twentieth century, there were eight declared or widely acknowledged nuclear weapons states. Nuclear weapons had not brought about the end of the world, but had ironically served as sources of stability and order from their inception to century’s end. This paradoxical outcome from the origin of nuclear weapons to the end of the twentieth century happened due to politics. Politics, for reasons that Clausewitz explained best of all, determines the context within which strategy and military art must be played out. The politics of the Cold War years from about 1947 to 1989 was dominated by two global military powers: the United States and the Soviet Union. These military “superpowers” dominated their respective alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Treaty Organization, creating a bipolarity in Europe which pacified that continent. In addition, the U.S. and the Soviet Union influenced military affairs outside of Europe due to their global military reach, their economic aspirations for world leadership, and their ideological controversies that reverberated across an international canvas. The politico-military rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was reflected in their respective military forces, including their nuclear weapons. Each deployed large numbers of weapons on launchers with intercontinental and lesser ranges: land-based ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and bomber-delivered weapons including air-launched cruises missiles. Cruise missiles were also land-based and sea launched. These weapons were

“used” in support of military strategy and policy but never actually employed in combat. They were “used” for armed persuasion, of which the most discussed and debated form was nuclear deterrence. Deterrence was the act of influencing another party by the credible threat to use nuclear weapons when vital interests were threatened and no other means presumably sufficed. NATO, outnumbered by its Soviet counterpart in conventional ground and tactical air forces deployed in Europe, adopted a doctrine of first use of (presumably) tactical nuclear weapons if military defeat by Soviet conventional forces was otherwise unavoidable. However, most U.S. deterrence theory envisaged a situation in which the Soviet Union threatened or carried out a nuclear first strike against the United States and/or NATO Europe. The U.S. military doctrinal response to an evolving Soviet threat was to emphasize deterrence by means of an evident capability for assured retaliation or “assured destruction” following any Soviet nuclear first strike. This meant that, under all exigent circumstances of surprise attack, the U.S. would be able to respond with overwhelming force and to inflict “unacceptable” damage on Soviet society. Although the Soviets had a somewhat different declaratory policy for the employment of nuclear weapons in warfare, both they and the Americans eventually exceeded by a large margin the requirements for assured destruction. Each state could attack, in first strike or retaliation, a wide variety of targets, including the other side’s nuclear and conventional (non-nuclear) military forces, important economic assets, command and control systems, and population centers. A plentiful supply of nuclear warheads and delivery systems created an overkill of capabilities and, therefore, a strategic stalemate. Neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union could hope to win or prevail in a nuclear conflict at an acceptable cost. The acknowledgment that nuclear war could not be won, in the pre-nuclear sense of prevailing in combat, was not automatic on the part of policy makers and military commanders in Washington or Moscow. The early years of the Cold War were dotted with proposals or plans for preventive wars, for protracted or “broken back” wars involving nuclear and conventional phases, and other attempted detours around the obduracy of nuclear weapons. But by the latter 1960s and early 1970s, it was recognized that the two states shared an interest in restraining their nuclear arms competition by negotiation, and U.S.–Soviet nuclear arms control became an important focus of policy makers’ attention for the next several decades. Nuclear arms control was suspect by those who favored nuclear disarmament, as they regarded nuclear arms control as a halfway house and an unnecessary compromise. Some American politicians with strongly anti-Soviet political leanings also objected to negotiating with an opponent who, in their view, could not be trusted to be forthcoming about state secrets. Nevertheless, mainstream Democratic and Republican politicians in the 1970s and 1980s, and Soviet political leaders starting with Leonid Brezhnev, lined up behind the process of arms control as a means of regulating the arms race. In addition, the Soviets were hard pressed economically to maintain a race in nuclear force modernization with the United States.