Thomas G. Mahnken
1. Introduction: The Gap Between Theory and Practice
Brendan Rittenhouse Green’s The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War makes an important contribution to our understanding of the history of the nuclear competition that took place between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.1 The book calls into question the extent to which Cold War-era theories, many of which argued that the existence of a mutually assured destruction (MAD) would stabilize the Soviet-American nuclear relationship, actually influenced American policymakers in practice. Indeed, Green documents in rich detail the disconnect between the theory of MAD and the way that U.S. policymakers actually behaved between 1969 and 1979.
As Green shows, American policymakers did not share theorists’ belief that the advent of nuclear weapons had transformed international relations. Nor were they convinced that the United States and Soviet Union had, by the 1970s, reached a condition of nuclear stalemate, a claim that lay at the heart of the notion of MAD. It turns out that it was far from obvious to policymakers confronted with the task of deterring the Soviet Union that nuclear deterrence was robust.2 To the contrary, most U.S. decision-makers, as well as influential scholars like Albert Wohlstetter, believed that the balance of terror was “delicate.”3 They worried a great deal about the survivability of U.S. nuclear forces, as well as the robustness and reliability of nuclear command, control, and communication systems, and they were less than sanguine about Soviet intentions and capabilities. With that in mind, they did not believe that nuclear stalemate was a given, and they took seriously Soviet views that a nuclear war could be fought and won.
As a result — contrary to the predictions and prescriptions of nuclear theorists, who held that the advent of nuclear weapons had transformed international politics — the United States found itself competing fiercely with the Soviet Union in the nuclear realm, as in many others. American policymakers clearly believed that nuclear weapons retained political and strategic utility, whether or not nuclear theory predicted or prescribed that they should. As a consequence, the significant qualitative and quantitative changes to the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals that occurred during the 1970s should be seen as a reflection of that competition, rather than as a deviation from the theory of MAD.
The other reviewers in this roundtable — Jasen Castillo, Scott Sagan, and Jayita Sarkar — all find considerable merit in Green’s arguments. Each, in their own way, characterizes The Revolution that Failed as an important contribution to our understanding of the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. The fact that Green’s research caused Castillo to reevaluate his own beliefs about nuclear weapons and strategic stability theory speaks to the power of his arguments.
All three reviewers also focus on the relationship between ideas and practice in U.S. Cold War nuclear strategy. Castillo specifically points to the career of Paul Nitze as an example of top policymakers’ skepticism of the theory of MAD. Sagan notes that some counterforce, or “nuclear war-fighting,” capabilities might indirectly enhance operational forms of nuclear stability, even in the absence of a conscious effort to achieve such a condition. Sarkar calls for giving greater attention to the role that “defense intellectuals” played in creating and disseminating theories about the effects of nuclear weapons. In this respect, Green’s book, and the responses to it, all focus on a defining feature of the field of strategic studies: Because war is the ultimate test of military effectiveness, and because wars are both occasional and unique, theory must play a central role in the study of military affairs.4
Finally, the reviewers suggest ways to broaden and expand the framework presented in The Revolution that Failed. Castillo sees value in testing Green’s argument against events that took place during both the early and late Cold War periods. Sagan argues that greater weight should be given to organizational and bureaucratic forces. And Sarkar calls for greater consideration of the role of the defense industry in shaping the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.
Nuclear Competition in the 21st Century
The nuclear landscape of the early 21st century is much different from the one that Soviet and American soldiers and statesmen faced during the Cold War.5 Whereas the nuclear balance throughout the Cold War was centered on the United States and the Soviet Union, today nuclear competition is increasingly multipolar. The total inventory of nuclear warheads has been decreasing for decades, but the number of nuclear powers is increasing. Some states, such as the United States and Great Britain, appear to see decreasing political utility in nuclear weapons, whereas others, notably Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea, appear to believe that the reverse is true. And whereas the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia have been constrained and shaped by bilateral nuclear arms control agreements, those of other nuclear powers, such as China, have not.
Moreover, much of the Cold War arms control regime has gone away, raising questions as to what, if anything, should replace it. In the future, as in the past, the advent of new technologies, such as hypersonic delivery vehicles, will reshape nuclear arsenals and potentially nuclear employment. Perhaps most significantly, given the growing number of players and increasing dimensions of competition, future patterns of interaction among nuclear powers are likely to be even more complex than those Green describes in The Revolution that Failed.
Given current circumstances, scholars and policymakers may be tempted to apply — consciously or unconsciously — concepts developed and used freely during the Cold War, such as “arms racing,” without fully understanding how they actually applied to the U.S.-Soviet strategic competition, let alone the extent to which they may apply under much different contemporary circumstances.6 The more we understand about the historical record of the Cold War, the more practice appears to diverge from theory. Green’s The Revolution that Failed thus contains an important note of caution that the gap between theory and practice may in fact be a yawning one. It is a book that should be read, discussed, and debated.
2. Who and What Made the Revolution that Failed?
In The Revolution that Failed, Brendan Rittenhouse Green makes a persuasive case that the theory of the nuclear revolution, which rests on the core premise of “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD, merits a substantial update.7 MAD, Green writes, “drains all competition out of the international system” and predicts political and military stability between nuclear-armed adversaries.8 This is because nuclear-armed countries cannot compete with each other without creating the ultimate possibility of self-annihilation. By placing “strict demands on the concept of nuclear stalemate,” proponents of “Pure MAD,” as Green calls it, predict that the international system should be very stable. But, Green observes, adversarial nuclear dyads continue to engage in security competition.9 What, he asks, explains that puzzling behavior?
Domestic political actors — such as interest groups, military organizations, and political factions — and their coalitional influence often drive security competition between nuclear rivals.10 But this “Parochial MAD,” as Green terms it, is, in his view, at best a post hoc explanation. Empirically rigorous studies of Parochial MAD are, moreover, hard to come by.11
With that in mind, Green seeks to lay out a new and elegant theory to explain nuclear competition. He tests that theory by studying the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and arms control efforts from 1969 to 1979. By investigating nuclear competition during superpower détente — traditionally understood as a period of reduced tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union — Green challenges the notion of MAD’s stabilizing influence on international politics since 1945.
Green concedes that the theory of nuclear revolution is “empirically powerful, logically elegant, and intuitively plausible,” but that it nonetheless fails to explain nuclear competition in peacetime.12 In his view, one must take into account technological uncertainty, perceptual uncertainty, and comparative constitutional fitness to make up for the shortcomings of the theory of nuclear revolution. According to Green, technological uncertainty — measured by the survivability of a state’s nuclear triad and its strategic defenses — is a significant variable because even “small technical changes can produce dramatic uncertainties about war outcomes.”13 As a result, countries cannot ignore their adversaries’ efforts to build up their nuclear capabilities and, at times, to determine that they must respond in kind. Perceptual uncertainty about “whether Russia accepted the core tenets of the nuclear revolution, as commonly understood in Washington,” Green argues, further drove military competition.14 What Green terms “comparative constitutional fitness,” which refers to “how efficiently states expect to compete and cooperate,” also contributes to how states determine the costs and benefits of peacetime nuclear competition.15 Leaders, Green asserts, will naturally factor in the “internal capabilities of the state to respond effectively to external pressures” by influencing resource extraction, direction, and production when making decisions about whether and how to run an arms race in peacetime.16 Green tests these variables across four cases: nuclear competition and arms control under the Nixon administration (1969–1971); U.S. nuclear acquisition under the Nixon and Ford administrations (1971–1976); U.S. nuclear employment under the Nixon and Ford administrations (1972–1976); and the Carter administration’s nuclear force posture (1977–1979).
This book makes a valuable contribution to the security studies literature by explaining some of the shortcomings in what is perhaps its most influential theory. MAD, in the view of many scholars, allegedly kept the Cold War cold and has prevented great-power war since 1945. Even though Green is not the first person to challenge the claim that nuclear weapons tend to have a stabilizing effect on international politics or the core assumptions upon which that claim is based, he unquestionably makes significant theoretical and empirical contributions. His work is bound to shape future research on questions relating to the effects of nuclear weapons on adversarial dyads, nuclear crises, crisis bargaining, and arms control, among others. The Revolution that Failed would be an excellent addition to syllabi in both graduate research seminars and undergraduate courses on international nuclear politics.
The Roles of Defense Intellectuals and Business Actors
As I read The Revolution that Failed, I could not help but wonder about the role of defense intellectuals and business actors in imagining, creating, and disrupting the supposedly stabilizing effects of nuclear weapons on international politics. This is important to think about for two reasons. First, the theory of the nuclear revolution merits an investigation as an idea, or even an ideology, that has emerged from a largely traditional understanding of the Cold War. This orthodox vision of the world after 1945 involved solely the two superpowers — each armed with nuclear weapons pointed at each other — that ultimately stopped short of pressing the proverbial “red button” because of MAD. This framework, however, overlooks the Cold War’s global nature, and particularly those instances in which the struggle led to significant regional military conflicts.17 Although the perspective encapsulates the stability between the great powers, it does so at the cost of ignoring the Cold War’s “killing fields.”18
Green does not critically assess the context in which the ideas that underpinned the nuclear revolution emerged, the interests of the actors who canvassed for those ideas, or the processes through which they grew in popularity. Yet, to comprehensively investigate whether the nuclear revolution failed, would it not make sense to examine why MAD became the predominant theory of international politics after the end of World War II and to explain why understanding its failure is necessary in the 21st century? The “history of security studies,” to borrow the phrasing that Green employs in his discussion of the storied past of the theory of the nuclear revolution, cannot be understood without a serious engagement with the intellectual history of key individuals, such as Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, or of the battles over social science at influential research institutions like the RAND Corporation.19
Second, the period of Green’s study, 1969–1979, was a moment of transformation for American global economic power, with significant ramifications for the country’s domestic political economy.20 However, the four case studies in the book do not account for this change. Technological uncertainty, perceptual uncertainty, and constitutional fitness are not variables that can adequately take into account or understand the key roles that economic and business actors might have played in the story. It is, of course, possible to argue that in scenarios involving nuclear warfare, where survival of the state is at stake, economic factors may be inconsequential. This assumption, however, ignores the role played by the businesses that manufacture bombers and missiles — which more often financially benefit from the delicate nature of the nuclear balance — as well as the structure of business-government relations that influence procurement. Green seems to assume that economic and business actors are encompassed within his concept of constitutional fitness, but this downplays their actual significance.
Notwithstanding these points, The Revolution that Failed is an important book for security studies scholars and will remain so for years to come. After all, it makes an impassioned call to revisit one of the most influential theories of the nuclear age.
3. Nuclear Revelations About the Nuclear Revolution
Brendan Rittenhouse Green has written an important book. The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War raises the curtain of secrecy that has hidden the details of U.S. nuclear policymaking during a dramatic decade in the middle of the Cold War, from 1969 to 1979.21 Green has discovered a treasure trove of historical data based largely on declassified U.S. government documents. His painstaking analysis demonstrates that the U.S. government never fully accepted that it should, for the sake of “nuclear stability,” forgo counterforce capabilities against the Soviet Union or keep the U.S. civilian population vulnerable to a nuclear attack. Green also demonstrates in a compelling manner that the U.S. government used arms control negotiations to protect military advantages it wanted to maintain against the Soviet Union and to avoid arms racing in areas in which it felt that the United States had domestic political disadvantages.
Putting MAD in the Crosshairs
Green’s first and major target is “the theory of the nuclear revolution” — or what he calls “Pure MAD” (mutually assured destruction) — which, as he puts it, posits that “once nuclear arsenals are sufficiently large and secure against a preemptive attack … no state can hope to launch a nuclear war without being utterly destroyed in retaliation.”22 If that is the case, Green asks, why was it the U.S. government’s acquisition policy during this period to invest so heavily in hard-target counterforce capabilities designed to destroy Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs)? Why did the U.S. government craft a nuclear employment policy “aimed at fighting a protracted nuclear war?”23 And why did the U.S. government pursue an arms control policy aimed at limiting the size and shape of Soviet nuclear forces when MAD would suggest that, once a state has achieved a secure second-strike capability, increases in arsenal size would be pointless? Why did America not just practice unilateral restraint and let the Soviet Union waste resources on redundant, unnecessary nuclear forces?
Green’s secondary target is what he calls “Parochial MAD,” the theory that while U.S. political leaders may have accepted Pure MAD, U.S. military leaders — imbued with parochial bureaucratic interests in larger arsenals, larger budgets, and creating offensive counterforce doctrines to limit damage in a nuclear war — were able to highjack nuclear policy. Proponents of this theory argue that military leaders, biased by these organizational interests, were able to form alliances with domestic political actors who favored larger arsenals and more advanced ICBMS, submarines, and bombers because of their parochial economic interests. The combined parochial interests of the “military-industrial complex” produced acquisition policy, employment policy, and arms control policy that were more competitive with the Soviet Union than advocates of Pure MAD recommended at the time.
In contrast, Green argues that U.S. political leaders never fully accepted the logic of Pure MAD — that there was a permanent “nuclear stalemate” — and instead, following the influential ideas of Albert Wohlstetter, thought that nuclear weapons created a “delicate balance of terror.”24 In an independent and impressively detailed technological account of each leg of the nuclear triad (long-range bombers, silo-based ICBMs, and submarine-based SLBMs), Green demonstrates that U.S. leaders had rational reasons to be uncertain about the survivability of these crucial nuclear delivery platforms over time.
Moreover, U.S. leaders feared a second source of instability, which, as Green puts it, manifested itself in the “perceptual delicacy of the Cold War nuclear balance.”25 U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned that Soviet nuclear doctrine, observed behavior in exercises, and especially Soviet civil defense programs — which produced deep underground shelters for thousands of Soviet party officials — meant that Soviet leaders believed that a nuclear war might be winnable, or at least survivable.26 He quotes a declassified 1975 National Intelligence Estimate to support this point. The Soviets, the document states, “probably expect their civil defenses to be able to preserve a political and economic cadre and to contribute to the survivability of the Soviet Union as a national entity.”27
In addition, Green argues that the U.S. leadership was also concerned about whether the American democratic political system could effectively compete with the Soviet command economy in an unconstrained arms race. He builds upon the theory of “comparative constitutional fitness,” originally developed by David D’Lugo and Ronald Rogowski in their study of the Anglo-German naval race before World War I, to explain how American political authorities used arms control agreements to restrict the relative size of nuclear arsenals (which they feared the Soviets could excel at) while not restricting qualitative improvements in nuclear delivery technology, such as multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) or cruise missiles (in which the U.S. had advantages).28 Green argues that fears about the delicate nuclear balance and a perceived American political inability to compete in a quantitative arms race explain why the United States continued to develop advanced counterforce capabilities and engaged in competitive arms control policies. Contrary to scholars who emphasize the bureaucratic and organizational influences on these outcomes, Green maintains that “the late Cold War nuclear competition occurred because American leaders chose it. They chose it because they thought it served their strategic purposes, not because it was forced on them from below.”29
Green writes with verve and humor. He calls Cold War Soviet-American arms control negotiations “the Seinfeld of great power politics: a wildly popular show about nothing.”30 He claims that the United States has a “Houdini-like aptitude for escaping Pure MAD’s predictions” that “place a straitjacket around nuclear competition.”31 More importantly, he writes with the insight and authority of someone who has read and digested the massive range of relevant documents that have now been declassified. In this light, Green’s book is an important contribution to the literature on the nuclear history subfield that emphasizes the importance of domestic politics in U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiations.32 It is also an important contribution to the security studies literature and is an especially helpful complement to the work that has been done on nuclear doctrine, military planning, and deterrence theory that combines sophisticated theorizing with rich empirical study.33
Three Critiques
Despite these twin achievements, I see three weaknesses in The Revolution that Failed. First, Green’s analysis of U.S. nuclear employment policy overemphasizes the degree to which civilian leaders were in control of the details of nuclear targeting. Political leaders may have made their own nuclear doctrine, but they did not make it just as they pleased. The counterforce doctrine directed by “National Security Decision Memorandum 242” in 1974, which Green analyzes in detail, relied in part on having “withholds” of Soviet national command-and-control targets and major cities to encourage similar restraint on Moscow’s part and to coerce Soviet leaders into ending any limited war without destroying American cities. But, as was later discovered by Gen. Lee Butler and Defense Department official Franklin Miller, the U.S. Strategic Air Command did not implement that directive:
For decades, the military authorities who controlled access to the SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) target base and the protocols employed in its construction thwarted every effort by the OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) officials responsible for formulating nuclear weapons targeting policy to gain the insight necessary for overseeing the translation of that policy into the nuclear war plan.34
It was only in the 1980s that Butler and Miller discovered that the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, “without informing the Joint Staff or OSD, much less the White House staff … had decided to define a ‘city’ in such a manner that had the President ordered a strike that included the cities withhold, all of those cities would nevertheless have been obliterated.”35 In short, the organizational and bureaucratic forces whose influence Green rejects in his critique of “Parochial MAD” had far more behind-the-scenes influence than he acknowledges.
Second, Green’s theoretical framework misses the possibility that some counterforce or “nuclear war-fighting” capabilities might actually enhance operational forms of nuclear stability. Green’s analysis, for example, reveals that U.S. anti-submarine warfare capabilities against Soviet submarines patrolling off U.S. coasts were much more effective than the public or scholars knew in the 1970s or 1980s. But this form of counterforce capability forced the Soviet military to move its submarines back into the “bastions” near the Soviet Union, with the objective of preserving its SLBM second-strike capability. This had the benefit, however, of giving the United States greater warning time of a Soviet SLBM first strike, which provided increased confidence that America could launch strategic bombers on ground alert, as well as command-and control aircraft — including the president’s command post — on warning if necessary. The U.S. command-and-control system was far from perfect, as the history of accidents and near-accidents during the Cold War demonstrates, but U.S. anti-submarine warfare improvements in the 1970s arguably added more stability than Green acknowledges.36
My third and final criticism concerns how best to critique the Pure MAD theory. Green focuses on whether the U.S. government followed the prescriptions of such prominent “MADvocates” as Kenneth Waltz, Robert Jervis, and Charles Glaser. But these scholars fully concede that the U.S. government did not follow their advice. MADvocates were promoting a normative theory, not a predictive theory. Waltz, for instance, argued that leaders displayed “decades of fuzzy thinking in high places about what deterrence is and how it works.”37 Jervis, similarly, insisted that “MAD is a fact, not a policy.”38 And Glaser has consistently maintained that his views about MAD (with respect to both Cold War strategy toward Russia and contemporary strategy toward China) are prescriptive, and not reflective of official Washington thinking.39
A better test of MAD theory, therefore, would focus not on whether U.S. government leaders believed in MAD, but rather on whether or not the U.S. pursuit of counterforce capabilities during the Cold War increased the risk of accidental war by creating dangers of mistaken preemption, or what Thomas Schelling famously called “the reciprocal fear of surprise attack” and “the dynamics of mutual alarm.”40 Given the fortunate fact that there has not been a nuclear war since the use of the atomic bombs against Japan in 1945, scholars will need to be creative. That task will rely in part on counterfactual reasoning, analyzing historical crises, false warning incidents, and close-calls. This approach has already produced a number of debates among scholars who have tried to assess whether nuclear deterrence produced stability or instability during the Cold War, and what effect it has on nuclear rivals today.41
Green has set a high standard for how to use declassified documents to test theories and understand government behavior during the Cold War. His insights should also influence future debates about nuclear strategy and deterrence.
4. Revolutionary Thinking: Questioning the Conventional Wisdom on Nuclear Deterrence
Beating up on the theory of the nuclear revolution has become a popular enterprise these days.42 Decades after the end of the Cold War, scholars have begun to cast doubt on the things that I learned in graduate school about nuclear weapons, especially the notion that the condition of mutually assured destruction (MAD) should promote stability among the great powers. As a former student of Charles Glaser, this, on the one hand, comes as somewhat of a shock. On the other hand, it speaks to doubts that I have long harbored about the theory of the nuclear revolution. If the theory is so powerful, then why can it not explain the Cold War arms race? Why did leaders in the United States, NATO, and the Soviet Union not take comfort in MAD? Surely there must be more going on here than simply the suboptimal behavior of dunderheaded policymakers?43
Brendan Rittenhouse Green has provided a very compelling answer to these questions in his creative new book, The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War.44 Not only is this volume a balm for my distress, it also makes two important contributions to our understanding of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War. At the outset, Green provides a compelling strategic logic to explain why the United States and the Soviet Union pursued competitive nuclear weapons policies, including in the arena of arms control. Competition made good strategic sense because policymakers had doubts about the survivability of nuclear arsenals; the political and territorial status quo did not always seem clear or obvious; and strategists on both sides could never know for certain that their adversary believed in MAD. Put another way, both the balance of interests and the balance of power are hard to measure.45 Complicating matters further, a country that showed that it did not believe in MAD might gain bargaining advantages in a crisis.
According to Green’s intricate argument, under these conditions we should expect states to compete, and to try to do so efficiently. They should select competitive strategies that reflect their strengths and weaknesses, or, as he puts it, “constitutional fitness.”46 To that end, American policymakers could count on advantages in production and direction. These advantages translated into a preference for qualitative arms races. To illustrate the causal mechanisms of his argument, Green assembles an impressive amount of archival evidence from the 1970s. In careful detail, he takes the reader through the changes in U.S. nuclear weapons policy and the strategies that American policymakers pursued for arms control during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations.
If Green is right, and I think he is, his work calls into question the alleged benefits that should arise when nuclear-armed powers live under the condition of mutually assured destruction. International politics, his book posits, is not particularly stable in these circumstances. Theorists of the nuclear revolution discount the uncertainty about the survivability of nuclear arsenals that can arise with improvements in military technology. They also discount the ambiguity surrounding the political and territorial status quo. As a result, we should expect competition and crises, rather than the stable world predicted by the theory of the nuclear revolution. Green does a good job of explaining the wide-ranging implications of his argument for both international relations theory and national security policy. For example, optimists about nuclear proliferation need to exercise greater caution about the spread of nuclear weapons if they engender competition rather than peace.
This is a book that the field of security studies will need to grapple with, since it overturns much of what scholars believe about nuclear deterrence. All of us who share an interest in nuclear weapons policy should read it. As one might expect from work that undercuts the conventional wisdom about this era, Green’s book will probably spark further conversation about the Cold War and nuclear deterrence in general.
After finishing this masterly work, I am left with three main thoughts. First, it seems like American policymakers got more right than wrong about the Cold War nuclear arms competition. Second, I wonder now if victory was in fact possible in a nuclear war. Finally, can Green’s theory explain competition and arms control before and after the groovy 1970s?
Policymakers Largely Got It Right: Deterrence During the Cold War Was Not Easy
One fact that clearly emerges from Green’s book is that policymakers seemed to correctly understand the dynamics of Cold War nuclear deterrence. This observation contradicts the consensus in the scholarly literature, which holds that the nuclear revolution made the arms race unnecessary (and not really all that dangerous).47 According to this view, which is still widely held today, the condition of MAD should have stabilized international politics, since the requirements of nuclear deterrence were easily met and nearly impossible to overturn.48 Because nuclear arsenals remained secure, the cost of war was too high to risk competition. The intense nuclear competition, therefore, was not caused by strategic circumstances, but rather by domestic pathologies, which prevented policymakers in both Washington and Moscow from learning to live with and love the bomb. Policymakers simply missed the boat when it came to how and why nuclear deterrence worked.49
As Green’s theory would expect, however, American policymakers correctly believed that they inhabited a far more competitive world. In their view, too much uncertainty surrounded the requirements of nuclear deterrence, including the survivability of nuclear forces. They could also not know with enough certainty if the Soviets agreed about the virtues of MAD. The costs of war would be very high if they were wrong.
To illustrate, I recall watching former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld debate proponents of the nuclear revolution about the nature of deterrence at a meeting of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. Rumsfeld argued that nuclear deterrence was difficult and not guaranteed, not even in MAD, if such a thing existed. Even though this forum took place over two decades ago, I remember how Rumsfeld swayed many members of the audience to his position — especially the non-specialists — by turning to his opponents and asking: “And what if you are wrong about the power of MAD?”
Perhaps the views of the defense policy luminary Paul Nitze serve as a good snapshot of the Cold War consensus among policymakers about nuclear weapons. Nitze stands out as a unique player in the defense politics of the time, due to his four decades of experience in government under both Republican and Democratic administrations. After negotiating with him, the Soviets dubbed him the “Silver Fox,” and his biographer, Strobe Talbott, referred to Nitze as the “grey eminence of nuclear diplomacy.”50
Throughout his career, Nitze dismissed the deterrent value of MAD. The threat of mutually assured destruction, he felt, lacked the credibility to deter a Soviet attack on NATO or the United States, a concern that was widely shared within the U.S. government and by its European allies. As he explained:
To go after cities, if deterrence should fail, to my mind would be suicidal. It wasn’t just a question of damage-limiting; I believed—and still do—that a counterforce doctrine and posture of sufficient scope would persuade the Soviet Union that it could not count on achieving a military victory in a nuclear exchange. This would assure effective deterrence.51
Similarly, Nitze concluded that only superior nuclear forces would ensure international stability. The nuclear balance, in his view, influenced Soviet global ambitions. He warned,
I believe that only by maintaining this superiority of strategic and nonstrategic military forces can the United States have the optimum opportunity to use its military power short of war to support its foreign policy or be in a position to win a military victory, at the lowest level of conflict adequate to do the job, if war should, nevertheless, occur.52
Prudent policymakers had to hedge and could not rely on MAD to promote peace. As Nitze reflected toward the end of the Cold War: “Although some argued that nuclear weapons would radically change the nature of warfare, responsible officials did not hold this view.”53
And the Silver Fox was not alone. A wide swath of analysts and government officials largely shared his pessimism about MAD.54 The RAND Corporation, which grew up alongside its main sponsor, the U.S. Air Force, wrestled for decades with the question of how to implement credibly a policy of extended deterrence to NATO under a delicate nuclear balance of terror.55 Similarly, from the Office of Net Assessment the highly influential Defense Department strategist Andrew Marshall commissioned and conducted studies to investigate how the United States could most effectively compete with the Soviet Union. Marshall developed and promoted his “competitive strategies approach” in large part because he did not believe in nuclear stalemate.56
As the Cold War progressed, U.S. policymakers became increasingly enamored with ambitious and exotic nuclear deterrence strategies. The Kennedy administration replaced its predecessor’s concept of “massive retaliation” with the notional strategy of “flexible response,” which called for the United States to develop the capacity to prevail in a limited nuclear war. If deterrence failed in Europe and the Soviet Union launched a blitzkrieg against NATO, the United States needed more options than doing nothing or throwing the nuclear kitchen sink at Moscow in response. Whatever the good intentions, these schemes seemed more like risky bets than concrete strategies, and top policymakers never expressed much confidence in them.57 And when the Carter administration pushed its “countervailing strategy” in the late 1970s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff complained, in Janne Nolan’s words, that the United States “still did not have the forces to execute these even more elaborate civilian fantasies.”58
In addition to the development of increasingly ambitious strategies, one additional pattern of interest emerged in U.S. Cold War nuclear weapons policy: a cycle of optimism and pessimism about the state of the nuclear competition. Sometimes American officials believed that the United States had the lead both in terms of numbers and technology. At other times, the sky was falling. Consider the debate over the vulnerability of the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force, which Green describes in rich detail in his book.59 The Nixon administration entered into the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I ) interim agreement with the knowledge that U.S. advantages in multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) technology would give it a leg up against Soviet ICBMs. This optimism gave way to the concern in the mid-1970s that the Soviets had gotten the better end of SALT I, deploying its own MIRVs on its heavier, land-based ICBMs.60 A similar vacillation occurred with respect to the balance of intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe. Early in the Carter administration, U.S. officials concluded that the new Soviet SS-20 missile did not pose a threat, since NATO possessed other theater nuclear forces to counter it. But U.S. allies, West Germany in particular, convinced America that the SS-20 demanded an urgent American counter.61
What caused these oscillations between pessimism and optimism about the nuclear balance? American officials did not express confidence in MAD, as predicted by the theory of the nuclear revolution. Instead, these mood swings confirm Green’s theory about a delicate nuclear competition.
However, other factors than the ones identified in The Revolution that Failed might have contributed to these shifting estimates. The perception of U.S. NATO allies of the credibility of the American deterrent, for example, seems to have also played an important role in shaping American policy. U.S. officials displayed great sensitivity to the concerns of Washington’s allies. They still do.62 Consider the following counterfactuals: Would U.S. nuclear weapons policy have looked the same if the United States had not attempted to extend deterrence to Europe? Would it have looked the same if Washington had tried to extend deterrence with conventional forces, instead of relying primarily on nuclear weapons?63 My hunch is that nuclear competition would have still taken place — contrary to the dictates of the theory of the nuclear revolution — but that the arms race would have developed with significantly less intensity.
Was Victory Possible?
By the late 1960s, Soviet nuclear forces began to approach parity with the American arsenal. Proponents of the nuclear revolution mark this as the moment when the superpowers began to live in a state of mutually assured destruction. Both countries possessed seemingly secure second-strike forces of such size that, no matter how well they executed a first strike, neither would escape a devastating retaliatory blow.64 Neither country could limit damage to itself in any appreciable way, no matter what combination of offensive or defensive counterforce capabilities it threw at the problem. For proponents of the theory of the nuclear revolution, this condition would provide the foundation for an uneasy peace, if only the superpowers would embrace it.
Green convincingly demonstrates that the superpowers were buying none of it. Each made efforts to escape MAD, with the United States ultimately getting the better of the Soviets in the counterforce competition. The Revolution that Failed is quite good at illustrating the U.S. technological improvements that were made during the 1970s, which gave Washington the ability to significantly limit damage to itself in a nuclear exchange. Taken together with advances in communication, surveillance, and precision, America fielded an impressive array of counterforce capabilities. These would permit the United States to exploit vulnerabilities in Soviet nuclear-armed bombers and submarines. And the improved accuracy of U.S. forces would offset Soviet advantages in land-based ICBMs.
Did these U.S. capabilities mean, to paraphrase the title of a famous article from the 1980s, that victory was possible?65 I think that the answer is more political than technical. On the technical side, Green and others have provided persuasive evidence that the United States could have limited significant damage to itself in a nuclear exchange.66 Given these improvements in counterforce capabilities, the United States likely could have avoided assured destruction without resorting to the absurd civilian defense schemes that were promoted by people like T.K. Jones.67
Nonetheless, being on the receiving end of any kind of Soviet retaliatory strike seems unpleasant, to put it mildly. Cold War studies of limited nuclear attacks on the United States or the Soviet Union still paint a fairly destructive picture, with tens of millions of casualties on each side.68 And if anything, these studies probably downplayed the effects of mass fires.69 Moreover, the jury is still out on how many nuclear weapons detonations would cause a nuclear winter.70
The Revolution that Failed has persuaded me — albeit in an uneasy way — that the United States might have escaped Armageddon in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. However, I do not think the country would have emerged unscathed. The United States would have been better off than proponents of the theory of the nuclear revolution have claimed, but there would have still been plenty of pain to go around. Put another way, Washington might have broken out of MAD only to find itself still in the condition of mutually assured retaliation. A better place, to be sure, but still not free of grave danger.
There are three implications that flow from this observation. First, the bargaining advantages that the United States gained by escaping MAD might not have been very large because the costs of war remained extremely high. As my old mentor Roger Molander used to say, “The threat of one nuclear weapon detonating over Washington, D.C. during working hours is probably enough of a deterrent to focus the mind.” Second, since America likely lives in a condition of mutually assured retaliation with many of its adversaries today — Russia included — Washington probably still does not possess much of a bargaining advantage in crises, even though it possesses superior nuclear forces.71 Finally, crisis instability poses more of a danger in a world of mutually assured retaliation. Under MAD, striking preemptively in a crisis is futile, since neither side can limit damage to itself. Striking first in conditions of mutually assured retaliation, however, might to a certain extent pay off, depending on the vulnerabilities of an adversary’s arsenal, something an opponent will also realize. If these three observations hold, then the nuclear future might prove as, or potentially more, competitive than the nuclear past that Green describes in The Revolution that Failed.
Applying the Theory Before and After the 1970s
Future work should explore whether Green’s theory can shed light on the Cold War competition before and after the 1970s. My informed hunch tells me that there is much that Green’s argument can explain about the periods of history that preceded and followed that decade. For example, the Reagan administration seemed far more ruthless in its pursuit of American qualitative superiority when it began negotiations with the Soviets on the Strategic Arms Reductions Talks (START) than the Nixon and Ford administrations did during the SALT process. Washington’s desire to reach an agreement that reduced Moscow’s superiority in land-based ICBMs matches the expectation of Green’s theory.72
By contrast, there are two earlier Cold War episodes that I have trouble reconciling with the book’s argument. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara eschewed intense competition as his tenure progressed over the course of the 1960s, such that the United States almost seemed to be taking a hiatus from the arms race and to be looking to embrace MAD instead.73 At the other end of the spectrum, the Gaither Report of 1957 stoked hysteria about the nuclear balance by suggesting that the United States lacked the ability to compete in the long run with the Soviet Union.74 This handwringing seems misplaced, given that we now know that the United States had serious advantages in nuclear weapons capabilities going into the 1960s.
Perhaps that is the beauty of Green’s argument. The Cold War nuclear balance was delicate both before and after the 1970s. For this reason, it is not especially surprising that policymakers rode an emotional rollercoaster. Such a finding is important for today’s policymakers, who have recently rediscovered — with too much enthusiasm — great-power competition. The Revolution that Failed should remind us that when it comes to nuclear weapons, such competitions are difficult and dangerous.
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