Alternative Nuclear Strategies

Here's something I was pondering the other day...

The nuclear strategists at RAND, some of whom went on to become McNamara's Whiz Kids, were significantly influenced by neoclassical economics. Partly this is just a natural overlap since both RAND nuclear strategy and neoclassicism use game theory. But there's more to it than that - national leaders are utility-maximizing rational actors, different outcomes are expressed as numeric utility values, etc.

This makes me wonder: what would a nuclear strategy inspired by a different branch of economics be like? For example, what would a Keynesian strategy look like? Or one based on behavioral economics?

A behavioral strategy strikes me as particularly interesting, although it would obviously require considerable tinkering with history to have it around by the 50s. I'm imagining strategists that take a very empirical approach, looking through history to see how leaders and societies respond to extreme stress and mass casualties. Or lock undergrads in a room with a telephone, tell them they're the leaders of the free world and the commies want Berlin, and see how they react.

This may not have a huge direct effect on the world. But if McNamara still recruits his aides from RAND, it could have interesting repercussions for defense procurement and policy in the 60s.
 
Chances are behavioral economics would not assume that all parties involved are rational actors, therefore MAD never gets its OTL prominence and programs like the Nike for missile defense are developed. I see SDI actually existing i such a situation.
 
Chances are behavioral economics would not assume that all parties involved are rational actors, therefore MAD never gets its OTL prominence and programs like the Nike for missile defense are developed. I see SDI actually existing i such a situation.

You don't need rational actors to get MAD, although it helps. One of the criticisms of MAD is that it is never rational to launch a nuclear attack on an enemy that can fight back, so Assured Destruction would imply the US would let the Soviets take over Europe. I agree that it would probably place more emphasis on defenses, though, particularly civil defense and other passive measures.

One thing I wonder is if this might lead to a theory of a long war. There are very few conflicts in history that were ended by killing large numbers of the other side's civilians. The Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that the bombing of Germany was equivalent to 100 Fat Man bombs, and I've read there's good evidence Japan surrendered because of Russia's entry to the war, not Hiroshima. Paraguay kept fighting in the Paraguayan War even after losing an estimated 58% of its civilian population. Wars are generally ended by destroying the enemy's armed forces and occupying his territory, not killing civilians and blasting infrastructure.

A long war theory has all kinds of interesting implications. It makes passive and active defense extremely important. The argument against active defenses (SAMs, etc.) is usually that even if they only shoot down 50% of the enemy's aircraft, that still leaves enough to kill everyone. If you're anticipating a campaign rather than a single battle, even 20% shootdown rates start to add up. It would also advantage the bomber over the missile.

Long War is not a theory I believe in myself - I would describe myself as an advocate of Minimum Deterrence - but it seems plausible enough, and could have very interesting consequences.

Another interesting aspect of this is, setting aside nuclear strategy, the Whiz Kids are going to take this frame of my mind with them when they go to the Pentagon. I've read the reason McNamara & co. put so much emphasis in Cuba and Vietnam on "signaling the enemy," willpower, etc. was because they were coming at this from the perspective of Flexible Response strategic theory. Flexible Response is all about escalation control, limited responses, forcing the enemy to negotiate without going all the way. Behavioral strategists would come at this from a different viewpoint, using different analytical tools.
 
My understanding is that MAD was either a fallback plan or a post hoc reinterpretation, never the primary nuclear strategy of either side.

Early on (until the late 1960s, I think), US nuclear strategy was more or less a scaled-up version of strategic bombing doctrine. Nuclear weapons would be used not against the civilian population per se, but rather against the enemy's industrial base, transportation infrastructure, and major military hubs in order to wreck their ability to field an effective conventional army. Since most of these targets were in or near major cities, there would be horrendous civilian casualties, but they weren't the primary goal.

Later, as the Soviet arsenal and delivery mechanisms caught up with ours to the point that they could wreck our ability to fight a conventional war as well as we could wreck theirs, and as our delivery technology improved to get a nuke on target faster, more accurately, and more reliably, our strategy shifted to a three-pronged approach. The first prong was to prepare a limited, tactical war, taking out military targets close to the front to stablize the situation if we were badly losing a conventional war, or to retaliate for a limited Soviet strike. The second prong was to, if utter conventional defeat or a Soviet nuclear first strike was believed to be imminent and inevitable, strike first against the Soviet nuclear arsenal and destroy it: decapitating the political leadership first so nobody could order a retaliatiory strike, then taking out all known missile and air bases simultaneously. Then either the Soviets would surrender, or we would have a free hand to make tactical strikes against military targets in support of our convential forces. The third prong was to preserve enough of our forces in hard-to-hit forms (hardened silos, submarines, bombers already in the air, etc) for a revenge strike if the Soviets attempted a disarming first strike against us. It is this last prong, looked at in isolation, that people are usually thinking of when they talk about MAD.

As a side note, ABM and SDI were used in this strategy in support of all three prongs. They'd limit Soviet ability to make limited tactical strikes of their own, they'd defend against the handfull of nukes that would inevitably survive an American disarming first strike, and they'd allow a partial defense against a Soviet disarming first strike to preserve more missiles to retaliate with.
 

Hkelukka

Banned
MAD worked wonderfully in preventing exactly what it set out to prevent.

Now, did it actually help in world economics or any other field, having 20.000 nuclear missiles built and pointing at pieces of the same planet is never really smart. But the concept of war itself should prove that humans are not rational actors in any way shape or form.

We are primitive animals driven by pritimive urges. Strongest urge is to fear death. And flaming death from above is a pretty good motivator for our modern ape brains.

Behavioristic Nuclear Doctrine would probably be one where every member of the opposing military force and their families are tracked 100% of the time by satellites and they develope high penetration accurate missiles with low yield nuclear weapons.

"you fire nukes at us, you die, your family dies, your pets die, everyone else you've ever loved dies. But that one kid that picked on you in school, he'll live, also, everyone you hate will live!"

Might work?

But really, I could go for some doctor strangelove style nukes. Wonder who would need Stalins ear before he thinks its a good idea to build something like that.
 
My understanding is that MAD was either a fallback plan or a post hoc reinterpretation, never the primary nuclear strategy of either side.

McNamara's strategy at the end of his tenure was MAD, or, as he called it, Assured Destruction - ensure both sides have a secure second-strike capability so they'll never go to war.

Early on (until the late 1960s, I think), US nuclear strategy was more or less a scaled-up version of strategic bombing doctrine. Nuclear weapons would be used not against the civilian population per se, but rather against the enemy's industrial base, transportation infrastructure, and major military hubs in order to wreck their ability to field an effective conventional army. Since most of these targets were in or near major cities, there would be horrendous civilian casualties, but they weren't the primary goal.

Massive Retaliation - which, despite the name, was not necessarily retaliatory, but could also be preemptive - was only the US strategy up until 1960. It arguably remained the unofficial strategy of the JCS, but McNamara was sold on Flexible Response, the idea of tailoring the response to the provocation, with the aim of containing a war at a level below full strategic exchange.

Flexible Response was the brainchild of the RAND boys, and assumed rational leadership and controllable escalation. It treated leaders as members of the species homo economicus - by possessing the right spectrum of capabilities and doing the right "signaling" or "messaging," the US could ensure that aggression would always be irrational, or, if in a war, that escalation beyond the current level of the war would always be irrational. Thus, since it would be irrational, the Soviets wouldn't do it.

Flexible Response is distinct from Assured Destruction and Massive Retaliation in that it does not promise a devastating response to Soviet attack. Its essence is that the US will escalate the conflict to the level that will permit the US to win at the least cost - which, in the early 60s, meant tactical nuclear strikes but city avoidance. Then, the US will keep the war at that level of escalation through "escalation dominance" and "intrawar deterrence," ensuring that it would be against the interests of the Soviet Union to escalate any further.

This has certain consequences, some good, some bad. For example, it meant McNamara spent a lot of money on command & control and presidential survival - the president had to be alive and in command of the armed forces, so that he could decide the appropriate level of response. Eisenhower, by contrast, had just written letters to his field commanders giving them authority to start bombing if they couldn't contact him.

However, once they got into office, Flexible Response started to look a lot harder than it had at RAND, and McNamara slowly switched course to a policy of Assured Destruction. This was based on the same framework, but made fewer assumptions about humans being always and forever rational even under nuclear attack. One could see it as the same policy, except with only two levels of escalation - nuclear war or no nuclear war - instead of a ladder of escalation. Of course, strategies changed again when Nixon got into office, although I don't know very much about that time period.

The really interesting thing about this, in my view, isn't the strategy itself. After all, if WW3 breaks out then it's all so many ashes anyway, and there's good reason to question how much this sort of thinking actually penetrated the Pentagon's war planning staff. The interesting thing is the analytical framework that went into the concept of Flexible Response and Assured Destruction, that analyzed state leaders as rational actors responding to incentives and threats. This analysis of nuclear strategy informed the Whiz Kids' analysis of other fields of strategy as well. You can see this in how the administration responded to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, by trying to "signal" and "demonstrate resolve" and use threats and incentives to induce the other party to do what they wanted. A behaviorist or Keynesian nuclear strategy would not only mean a different set of nuclear procurement policies, but probably also a different approach to the crises and travails of the 60s.
 
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But really, I could go for some doctor strangelove style nukes. Wonder who would need Stalins ear before he thinks its a good idea to build something like that.

I don't know much about Soviet doctrine, but my understanding is that they expected to survive a nuclear war and rebuild because they were on the right side of history or some such, and that this was particularly the case under Stalin. A doomsday cobalt bomb would be difficult to justify ideologically. I'm not sure if that would be a problem or not. It would certainly be an interesting development, and a rather frightening one if the Soviets also included the whole automatic kill-everyone computer system. Better hope they debugged it really thoroughly.

Stalin wouldn't be the person to do this, though. The Soviets didn't test a Teller-Ulam-style hydrogen bomb until 1955, and Stalin died in 1953.
 
Dead Hand

I don't know much about Soviet doctrine, but my understanding is that they expected to survive a nuclear war and rebuild because they were on the right side of history or some such, and that this was particularly the case under Stalin. A doomsday cobalt bomb would be difficult to justify ideologically. I'm not sure if that would be a problem or not. It would certainly be an interesting development, and a rather frightening one if the Soviets also included the whole automatic kill-everyone computer system. Better hope they debugged it really thoroughly.

Stalin wouldn't be the person to do this, though. The Soviets didn't test a Teller-Ulam-style hydrogen bomb until 1955, and Stalin died in 1953.

The Soviets did build an 'automatic-kill-everyone-computer-system', which was called "Dead Hand". Given the extremely centralized authoritarian nature of the Soviet system, this was a perfectly reasonable development, if you think about it. After all, what better what to ensure that the core Soviet cadres (which they believed to be the ONLY things really necessary for the revolution to succeed) would be preserved than to provide for the destruction of everything else if they were somehow destroyed.
 
Dead Hand

Dead Hand is supposedly still operational, though as far as I am aware it never reached full automation and instead only allowed the USSR to devolve control of the arsenal onto a group of junior officers at a secure facility
 
Automation...

It all depends upon how you define 'automation' I suppose. The whole Strangelovian 'doomsday machine' (i.e. a set of computers that can activate the weapons with no 'off' switch included by design) is an utter non-starter for any nation (after all, would future governments follow the policies of prior ones?...what about malfunctions?...etc.), but the purpose of Dead Hand (as well as the rather convoluted thinking behind SLBM launches in the USN...a subject that gets almost no real attention) is to guarantee that firing orders get out no matter what.

Dead Hand is built around the concept that if certain environmental conditions are not met (typically orders to the effect of 'everything is just fine here, we are all alive and well'), the Dead Hand systems will fire on schedule without a specific counter-order by national command authority. If, as would almost certainly be the case as part of a 'counter-cadre' strike - the very circumstances that the Soviets actually feared, and the reason that the Pershing IIs terrified them so badly, the national command authority was destroyed, and a significant number of nukes detonated within the Rodina, Dead Hand would activity, assuring that the evil capitalist aggressors (that is us, for those of you who aren't clear on that) would not escape without punishment.

The system was in use, though my latest understanding is that it was discontinued as most of the Soviet C3I network fell apart in the late 90s and became hopelessly unreliable.
 
You don't need rational actors to get MAD, although it helps. One of the criticisms of MAD is that it is never rational to launch a nuclear attack on an enemy that can fight back, so Assured Destruction would imply the US would let the Soviets take over Europe. I agree that it would probably place more emphasis on defenses, though, particularly civil defense and other passive measures.

MAD is a strategic level theory. It leaves room for the use of tactical nuclear weapons, that were the base for NATO defence in Europe in the 60 and 70.
Under MAD logic (I know, I know...), the two super powers would not attack each other rear areas directly, but using tactical nukes against armoured units, warships, etc, would not lead to a full blown nuclear war.
There used to be a joke in NATO that the definition of a tactical nuke was one that exploded in Germany...
 
MAD is a strategic level theory. It leaves room for the use of tactical nuclear weapons, that were the base for NATO defence in Europe in the 60 and 70.
Under MAD logic (I know, I know...), the two super powers would not attack each other rear areas directly, but using tactical nukes against armoured units, warships, etc, would not lead to a full blown nuclear war.

Yeah, I misspoke.

There used to be a joke in NATO that the definition of a tactical nuke was one that exploded in Germany...

And you can measure the distance between German towns in kilotons.
 
A long war theory has all kinds of interesting implications. It makes passive and active defense extremely important. The argument against active defenses (SAMs, etc.) is usually that even if they only shoot down 50% of the enemy's aircraft, that still leaves enough to kill everyone. If you're anticipating a campaign rather than a single battle, even 20% shootdown rates start to add up. It would also advantage the bomber over the missile.
Err.. but most nukes were on ICBMs or SLBMs, and thus have 100% attrition even without defenses.... Building ABM systems that stopped, say 20%, of incoming missiles is a silly strategy, because the other side just builds 30% more launchers for cheaper than your ABM system.


Now, with a severely limited threat (Iran/North Korea), ABM systems make a lot of sense - but in the 1000s of missile scenarios of the cold war, they really, really don't.
 
Err.. but most nukes were on ICBMs or SLBMs, and thus have 100% attrition even without defenses.... Building ABM systems that stopped, say 20%, of incoming missiles is a silly strategy, because the other side just builds 30% more launchers for cheaper than your ABM system.

The argument is that, in our TL, ICBMs had a lower cost per warhead delivered. But, if we're assuming a long war with numerous sorties, than bombers have much lower cost per warhead delivered than an ICBM. Thus, a state pursuing a Long War strategy would procure lots of bombers but comparably fewer missiles. And an attrition defense makes sense against bombers.

I don't buy it myself, mind you. I was asking if it seemed plausible for somebody in the 50s to buy it, especially somebody with a vested political interest in pushing manned bombers.
 
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