Essay: The Dilemma of Nuclar Doctrine

The Dilemma of Nuclear Doctrine

For Americans, one of the more galling aspects of the current crisis in the Western alliance is that the Kremlin has sometimes seemed to be succeeding in persuading many Europeans who ought to know better that the Soviet Union is waging a genuine “peace offensive,” while the U.S. has recklessly embarked on a road that could lead to war. Part of the problem is that large segments of the European body politic have gone limp; much public opinion and political leadership too seem to be turning naive or neurotic, or both. The U.S. has not helped by responding with a loud voice and a tin ear. Before President Reagan’s widely hailed speech last week, his bellicose anti-Soviet rhetoric and willful insensitivity even to legitimate Western European concerns often made it easier for Leonid Brezhnev to find an audience for his siren’s song.

But the U.S. has been on the defensive because of a deeper problem—one that has been in the background for decades but has only just come to the fore since Brezhnev lured Reagan into a public argument about the feasibility of limited nuclear war. At issue is declaratory nuclear doctrine: the official statements that the superpowers make to define the circumstances in which they might resort to the use of their ultimate weapons. On this particular grim but hypothetical topic, the U.S. is almost sure to continue taking a beating.

For the U.S., declaratory nuclear doctrine is intended as an auxiliary to military deterrence. The words are supposed to express the political will to use the weapons if necessary, and thus dissuade the other side from ever making their use necessary. With precisely that goal in mind, a succession of American Administrations, going back to the ’50s, has asserted that in extremis, the U.S. would be prepared to fight a nuclear war with the Soviet Union; moreover, the U.S. has reserved the right to detonate the first mushroom cloud if that is what it takes to halt Soviet aggression.

Keeping open the option of first use has been justified, and indeed required, by the U.S.S.R.’s geographical proximity to Western Europe and the Warsaw Pact’s considerable advantage over NATO in manpower and non-nuclear armaments. The defense of Western Europe has depended on the threat that conventional Soviet attack could provoke an American nuclear response.

Soviet declaratory doctrine, by contrast, is an auxiliary to propaganda and diplomacy. The words serve to disguise and even deny actual military capabilities. Instead of trying to frighten their enemies into restraint, the Soviets are trying to enhance their bogus claim of championing disarmament and advance their campaign to divide NATO.

It is with those ulterior motives that Brezhnev has recently had such a field day at Reagan’s expense. He has reiterated the Soviets’ longstanding protestations that theirs is a purely retaliatory, “second-strike” doctrine; he has denounced the notions both of limited nuclear war and of victory in such a war as dangerous fantasies, and he has floated a proposal for a joint Soviet-American renunciation of first use. That innocent-sounding suggestion is actually thoroughly loaded, since it would undercut the threat of first use on which Western deterrence partially rests.

Furthermore, none of Brezhnev’s disavowals and reassurances conforms with the nature and size of Soviet military programs. The Soviets’ arsenal is simply too bloated and too destructive to qualify as purely defensive. Some of their larger missiles have little imaginable utility except for partially disarming the U.S. by attacking its most heavily protected missile sites. And even the Soviets’ genuinely defensive programs, such as their vigorous civil defense efforts and antiballistic missile research, are worrisome in that they suggest a determination to minimize the damage of a war and, to that extent at least, to “win.”

All this does not mean that the present Soviet leadership is secretly plotting war as it talks peace. The old men in the Kremlin probably believe what they preach about the impossibility of containing the spread of a nuclear conflict or of launching a successful sneak attack. But there is nonetheless good reason for concern about the future. While it is extremely unlikely that even some future generation of Soviet leaders would initiate an unprovoked first strike, they might be tempted to try to get the drop on the U.S. in a High Noon-type showdown over some crisis in the Third World or Europe. If the Kremlin thought the Americans were about to exercise their self-avowed first-use option, the Soviets might go for their own nuclear guns all the more quickly.

The instinct to do so would follow quite logically both from what the Soviets say in public and from what they may be thinking about among themselves. The Soviets may be correct in dismissing the concept of limited, controlled nuclear war as highly unrealistic. Even some distinguished American strategists and military men who publicly defend that concept as politically necessary for the defense of Europe concede in private that a so-called selective flexible response would be likely to unleash a chain reaction out of either side’s control. Since the Soviets make no bones about the inevitability of escalation, in an actual war with the U.S. they would probably try to make the best of a bad situation by keeping one step ahead on the escalator, being the first to fire off weapons at the next higher level, then hunkering down under their elaborate defenses.

Thus, the world in general—but the West in particular—has stumbled into a morass of paradoxes. The Soviet Union has promulgated a benign-sounding nuclear doctrine, which its principal adversary, the U.S., does not believe, coupled with a threatening program that induces the U.S. to fear and prepare for the worst. One peril of worst-case planning is that it can sometimes be self-fulfilling.

The U.S., for its part, has clung to a missile-rattling doctrine that made more sense ten years ago, when the West enjoyed nuclear superiority. Now the Soviets have amassed new nuclear weapons to back up their formidable conventional ones. That raises a disturbing question about what might happen if the U.S. ever made good on the promise of its nuclear umbrella over Europe by responding to tanks with missiles. In that event, the Soviets might rain down warheads on the U.S. itself—a prospect that makes many doubt whether a limited nuclear war would stay that way. And even if it would, the Europeans could hardly be consoled by the idea of a war “limited” to Europe.

In short, the time-honored U.S. declaratory nuclear policy of deterring aggression by threatening to “go nuclear” against a Soviet tank blitzkrieg has lost much of its credibility. Worse, that doctrine has recently risked backfiring: it has frightened the U.S.’s allies and emboldened its adversaries—which is exactly the opposite of what declarations of nuclear policy are supposed to do.

The fault for these deepening dilemmas lies largely with the Soviet Union. If the Soviets were truly interested in restoring stable mutual deterrence, they could scale down their military machine and desist from international behavior that provokes crises.

But instead of simply waiting for such welcome though unlikely Soviet contributions to stability, the U.S. can make a few salutary moves of its own. One is to keep arms control alive. The unratified SALT II treaty established modest but significant limitations on the most threatening components of the Soviet arsenal. That is why the Reagan Administration wants to keep the SALT limits in place, even though it vows it can do better in its own negotiations with the Soviets.

On that score, the Europeans are justifiably skeptical. Until Reagan’s initiative last week, his Administration had displayed a mixture of barely suppressed, ideologically motivated hostility to the very idea of arms control. Even now the Europeans are not convinced that the Administration wants to achieve an agreement with the Soviets rather than just score propaganda points.

In its arms program, the U.S. should concentrate on developing systems that are by definition retaliatory in that they cannot destroy concrete-sheltered targets with only a few minutes’ warning time.

This would mean giving priority to manned bombers, cruise missiles and submarine-launched missiles. A certain number of highly accurate ballistic missiles like the intercontinental MX and the intermediate-range Pershing II will be necessary as a counter to similar, more numerous Soviet systems, but the unchecked proliferation of such first-strike capabilities on both sides increases the risk not just that the rockets will be on hair trigger but that the nerves of the men who control them will be too.

Another urgent need—which is as much the Europeans’ responsibility as the U.S.’s—is an all-out, sustained buildup in conventional forces. The Western democracies will probably never be able to match the Soviet bloc in conscripted military, but by substantially narrowing the gap, NATO might some day be able to deter the armored legions of the Warsaw Pact without having to rely quite so much on the threat of using the nuclear equalizer. With the viability of nuclear deterrence against nonnuclear aggression already in doubt, the less that concept is belabored, the better.

The same goes for official speculation about nuclear war in general. U.S. leaders should simply shut up on the subject—or at least make much clearer that they are determined to avoid nuclear war rather than create the impression that they are pondering how to fight it. It was a good sign when Secretary of State Haig acknowledged two weeks ago that “there’s too much talk” about limited nuclear war and that “this talk should be terminated.” Reagan’s latest speech has also helped. Maybe when the rhetorical belligerence dies down on this side of the Atlantic, the caterwauling on the other side, the whining of the Europeans and the self-righteous propagandizing of the Soviets will do the same. Or at least there will be less excuse for it.

—By Strobe Talbott