The "D" Word IV: What Actions Did and Do We Hope to Deter with our Nuclear Deterrent?
“Deter” means to try to turn aside action by means of fear (from Latin terrere).
You can’t deter ideas, right? You can’t deter desires. Actions you may be able to deter.
What actions have we hoped to deter with our “nuclear deterrent”?
After World War II, when we were the only ones who had the atomic bomb, some Americans allowed themselves to think that our having this stupendous weapon and our being the only ones who did would deter all wars. Ted Taylor, the physicist and renowned nuclear weapons designer (renowned among weapons designers anyway) at Los Alamos in the 50’s and early 60’s, said that the hope of deterring future wars was how he had justified to himself his own work to design more efficient nuclear weapons and “miniaturize” them so they could be used as “tactical” weapons by our troops and delivered on ballistic missiles.
The wars in Korea (1950-53) and Vietnam (1965-75) had shown Taylor, he said, that this hope was vain. Also, in 1966, while assigned to the Pentagon, he testified at a Congressional hearing during which he was startled by how uninformed our elected leaders were about what these weapons could do and the plans being made in the Pentagon for their use.
Afterwards, he stopped working on nuclear weapons entirely.
The first specific war that we hoped to deter with our nuclear weapons after World War II was a war with the Soviets in Western Europe. We feared they might invade and overwhelm Western Europe with their conventional forces. Their conventional forces were, most of our military leaders believed, far superior, certainly in numbers, to the ones we had there after World War II.
To deter the Soviets, President Eisenhower and our military strategists decided that instead of strengthening our conventional forces in Europe, we would build up and deploy our stockpile of nuclear weapons. We would include in this stockpile the smaller-yielding “tactical” nuclear weapons Ted Taylor had helped us develop, as well as the very much more powerful “strategic” hydrogen bombs of the kind we had tested for the first time in the Pacific just before President Eisenhower was elected—the thermonuclear “hydrogen” bombs. Which were a hundred times more powerful than the bombs that we had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Which had been thousands of times more powerful than the biggest strategic bombs used in World War II.
In his first year in office, President Eisenhower had formulated a “New Look” policy that said we would respond to any invasion of Europe, even a small one, even with conventional forces, with “massive offensive retaliatory force.” That meant, I think, that if the Soviets invaded Europe, we’d not only fight them in Europe with our new tactical nuclear weapons but would attack them back in their home country with“strategic” thermonuclear bombs using the bombers we had stationed at bases we had now over there.
Shortly after World War II, the Strategic Air Command was formed. Its mission would be to deliver our nuclear bombs and conventional strategic bombs with the means of delivery we had at the time—bombers of the kind we had used in World War II.
After 1948, the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command was General Curtis LeMay. As CINCSAC, he began to recommend a “strategy of preemptive counterforce.” That is, a surprise first strike by us on the Soviet Union’s military assets. He wasn’t urging deterrence. He was urging something else: pre-emption.
General LeMay was confident we could execute a pre-emptive first strike and “kill” the Soviet Union without running a risk of reprisal.
In 1949 the Soviets developed a Nagasaki style bomb and in 1955 a thermonuclear bomb and in 1957, the year LeMay stepped down as CINCSAC, they succcessfully tested an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. We were working on an ICBM too but hadn’t managed to get it working just yet.
With ICBMs, the Soviets would have a first-strike capability that could reach us here at home and maybe even a second strike capability they could exercise if we attacked them pre-emptively.
In 1960, we finally put some ICBMs called Atlas on alert.
In 1961, President Kennedy made General LeMay the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. LeMay was still pushing, it seems, his “strategy of preemptive counterforce,” that is, a surprise first strike by us on the Soviets.1
After the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949, they could have invaded Western Europe with conventional forces, as we had feared, and if we used nuclear weapons to respond to this attack, they could use nuclear weapons in Europe too. This could make a real mess of those small countries in Western Europe. Eastern Europe too probably.
The Soviets had successfully tested their first staged hydrogen bomb in 1955, during President Eisenhower’s first term.
Still, for most of the 50’s, the Soviets couldn’t attack us here in the United States with any nuclear bombs they had, we were pretty sure. Not easily. Their bombers had only enough range to be able to do one-way missions. That would have been an option, however.
At the end of the 50’s, though, after they successfully tested that first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, they could deliver nuclear weapons on us in the United States with something we had no defense against.
And still don’t.
Missiles are always on one-way missions.
A successful first strike with nuclear weapons would be not just a setback, like Pearl Harbor. It would likely be decisive. It would, that is, conclude matters.
Now we needed to have a nuclear deterrent, we thought, to deter the Soviets from doing a surprise first strike on us here in the United States.
It was quickly realized that to deter a first strike, our nuclear deterrent would have to include a “second strike capability.” We needed to be sure that after they had attacked us with nuclear weapons, we would still be able to attack them back with ours. Retaliate. Pay them back in kind. See how they liked it.
Or at least, from a deterrence point of view, we needed them to think we could do that after a first strike.
What about our plans for a first strike, as in General LeMay’s “strategy of premptive counterforce”? When President Kennedy took office, did we think the Soviets had a second-strike capability? General LeMay didn’t seem to think that was a concern at that time. Others weren’t so sure.
How much “second-strike capability” would be needed to deter?
Just one big warhead coming down on any of our major cities would be catastrophic for us, no matter how much destruction we had caused over there. The chances of an attack with only one warhead were slim to none, of course.
As we got further into the 60’s, our military leaders, with the possible exception of General LeMay, got to the point where they pretty much agreed that neither one of us could get away clean with a first strike. We both had “second-strike capability.”
When it came to a general nuclear exchange, there was also a lot of uncertainty about what kind of world any of us still alive would have to live in.
Would something like mutual “assured destruction” be the result?
The first person to use that expression was President Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert MacNamara. The prospect of “assured destruction” would now be what deterred us both.
Deterrence required that we both maintain this state of affairs.
This was called “stability.”
Next: Tenants of Deterrence Theory
McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival (1988), p. 545