You Might Want to Know: What is the difference between a “counterforce” and a “countervalue” attack with nuclear weapons?
The next several entries will deal with matters of nuclear war planning and strategy. It’s a most interesting and also appalling story.
You Might Want to Know: What is the difference between a “counterforce” and a “countervalue” attack with nuclear weapons?
Our first “integrated” plan for responding to a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union was put together at the end of the Eisenhower administration. It replaced the plan Eisenhower had announced early in his administration called New Look. The idea in New Look was to respond to a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union on us, or even a conventional military attack by them on us—and even our allies—by attacking the Soviets, the Chinese too, with our whole nuclear inventory, sending it all. “Massive retaliation” was another name for the strategy.
Many Americans seemed to be fine with President Eisenhower’s New Look plan for dealing with Communists. Doubts were expressed, however, by some of our allies as to whether we’d actually do a massive retaliation if Soviets attacked them with only conventional forces. Or even, in the case of our European allies, whether they would want us to do such a thing. A massive retaliation with nuclear weapons on the Soviets could turn out to be a very bad deal for our allies too, they thought.
President Eisenhower’s new plan would be called the Single Integrated Operations Plan, or SIOP, pronounced “sigh-op.” It was “integrated” because for the first time our different military forces would not be attacking on their own, each according to its own plan. Their attacks would now be coordinated. That would be a lot more efficient, you had to think. Less wasting of weapons.
President Kennedy replaced President Eisenhower in 1961. He and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara decided they wanted more options, more flexibility, in the SIOP. Working with people in the RAND Corporation, a private think tank that did a lot of consulting for our Air Force, they took up the idea that our “strategic” nuclear weapons, the big ones, might be used with two different strategic aims, called “counterforce” and “countervalue.”
A “counterforce” use would attack the other side’s nuclear weapons facilities. Fissile fuel production sites. Missile factories. Launch sites. Weapons storage facilities. This would be most effective, obviously, if it were done “preemptively,” before they attacked us with their nuclear weapons. But it could still be useful, it was thought, if we were only retaliating.
A “countervalue” use would be more like the strategic attacks we had conducted in World War II to try to destroy the enemy’s “war-fighting capability” in other ways. You can see how attacks on bridges, factories, railroads, oil refineries, food supplies, agricultural fields—things like that—would reduce their war-fighting capability.
Makes sense, no? Except that the effects of our nuclear weapons were far too big to be able to do what the Air Force called “precision bombing” of a bridge or a dam or a railroad or factory. Even the Hiroshima bomb had been much too big for that. By the 60’s, our “strategic” nuclear weapons had yields tens and hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.
In a countervalue attack, we would, then, really be talking about attacking cities, the way our fire-bombing had done in Japan in World War II and later our two atomic bombings. In the Pentagon, the countervalue weapons came to be referred to as “city-busters.”
In the new SIOP, the cities would be attacked only after the military targets had been attacked. If the Soviets hadn’t surrendered yet. After the cities were attacked, there might be no one left who could surrender.
Some important military leaders didn’t see why we would want to distinguish between counterforce and countervalue targets. One was General Thomas Power, the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command during Kennedy’s administration. When General Power was briefed on the new guidelines by William Kaufman, an MIT professor and RAND employee, Power is reported to have said,
Why do you want us to restrain ourselves? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. Look. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!
Did Power’s opposition mean that despite the new guidelines from the President, SAC and the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff that would develop an actual operational plan for the new SIOP would just ignore the guidelines and not distinguish between counterforce and countervalue attacks? We’d have to see. Secretary McNamara and other Secretaries of Defense probably should check on this to be sure. They would have to look at the actual operational plan. They’d rather be able to take SAC’s word for it, I’m sure.
It might seem that this distinction between counterforce and countervalue attacks did offer a way in which the lives of civilians might be spared. But consider. We knew that some “counterforce” targets—their missile silos, for example--would be, like ours, “hardened,” to try to keep them from being knocked out in a surprise first strike. Our counterforce weapons would therefore have to have much larger yields than our countervalue weapons did.
The warhead for the Titan II missile that we developed for counterforce attacks and began to deploy in 1962, had a yield of nine megatons, the equivalent of 9,000,000 tons of TNT, 600 times the yield of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?
And furthermore. A counterforce attack would have to attack ALL of their missile launch sites, wouldn’t it? All the ones we knew about anyway. If even one missile launch site survived and was able to launch a missile that would destroy even one of our cities, well, we wouldn’t want that. So to do what it was intended to do, destroy their nuclear capabilities, a counterforce attack would have to be a very large attack indeed that would use our largest warheads.
Wouldn’t such an attack kill more people than even a countervalue attack on Moscow and maybe some other cities in the Soviet Union would? Wouldn’t the certain prospect of a more limited countervalue attack on Moscow alone be enough to deter the Russians? Assuming deterrence was the aim?
Might this distinction between counterforce and countervalue weapons turn out in actuality to be a distinction without a difference?
We were learning from our weapons effects tests that if we doubled a missile’s accuracy, we could get the same radiation damage from four times less energy, and the same blast damage from eight times less energy.
It followed that as our missile guidance got better, we might be able to reduce the yields of the nuclear warheads on our counterforce missiles. Not the targeting, just the yield.
In any case, on the more accurate Minuteman III ICBMs we introduced starting in 1970, which were counterforce weapons, we had reduced the yields from the nine megatons of the W53 on the Titan II to the 170 kilotons of the new W62 warheads. Starting in 1979, though, we went ahead and increased the yields of the warheads on our Minuteman IIIs to the three-hundred fifty kilotons of the new W78. Only twenty-some Hiroshimas instead of the six hundred of the W53 on the Titan II but twice as much as the eleven Hiroshimas of the W62. Why not? The W78 weighed about the same as the W62. With the greater accuracy of the Minuteman III, twenty-one Hiroshimas should be enough to do the job in a counterforce attack, you’d have to think.
It should also do the job on the anti-missile defenses the Soviets had built around Moscow starting in the 70’s. We didn’t have, and still don’t, an anti-missile defense that we thought would work against ICBMs, but maybe they had found something that would. Maybe not. In any case, in our attack on those defenses, we wouldn’t take any chances. If we didn’t think one nuclear weapon would take out their anti-ballistic missile defenses, we would just put several W78s on the target.
Also by 1970, we had figured out how to put three W78s on our Minuteman missiles and send each to a different target. Now we might be able to do a counterforce and a countervalue attack at the same time if we wanted to. If any of it mattered.