...a treaty outlawing the use of ICBMs in the 1950s and result this may have on a Cold War and the development of space flight. What could cause this treaty and what could it’s inplications be?
Such a treaty certainly
would have been viable in the 1950s, and then probably more likely than at any time since, before a power base of institutionalised opposition in the form of officers with careers based entirely on ICBMs became established.
A treaty banning ICBMs would have been enormously appealing to both Eisenhower and Khrushchev; to Eisenhower because it would have provided a means of reigning in the ever growing power of the military-industrial complex that he feared would “
choke [America]
to death piling up military expenditures”, and to Khrushchev because it would have eliminated an entire category of nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union was years away from matching the United States in. For both it would have offered a way of reducing the international tension that had already raised the prospect of nuclear war to a hair-trigger.
Both men had personal experience of the terrible destructiveness that widespread war, be it of the conventional sort, had wrought on Europe, and both dreaded the prospects of nuclear war. For Eisenhower, it wasn’t just the prospect of enormous numbers of American and European lives being lost that concerned him, that he would be personally responsible for the deaths of millions of
Soviet civilians filled him with an absolute dread; in his memoirs of the invasion of Europe, Eisenhower describes a 1945 meeting with Secretary of War Henry Stimson where he had “
expressed the hope that we would never have to use such a thing (the atomic bomb)
against any enemy because I disliked seeing the United States take the lead in introducing into war something as horrible and destructive as this new weapon was described to be.” In their meeting at Camp David in September 1959, Khrushchev said that he wasn’t afraid of nuclear war; Eisenhower replied that he was and that he thought everyone should be.
Khrushchev had been bluffing; the thought of nuclear war terrified him. But he was the product of the Bolshevik regime and the court of Joseph Stalin; where the slightest weakness was seized on to destroy opponents. Hence his boast after Sputnik that the Soviet Union was turning out missiles “
like sausages”, when in fact the Soviet Union had few missiles, and fewer sausages.
For Nikita Khrushchev, signing a treaty banning intercontinental ballistic missiles would have been an enormous personal victory that delivered tangible benefits to the Soviet Union. It would have at the stroke of a pen eliminated a class of weapon that the United States already had the advantage in and, with its much greater industrial capacity, would shortly be producing in numbers that would overwhelm the Soviet Union for years to come. It would limit nuclear weapon delivery to bombers, intermediate and short range missiles, including submarine launched missiles, all of which the Soviet Union would be able to develop a credible deterrent to much quicker than they could deploy ICBMs.
It would also have been a clear sign that relations with the United States were normalising, and would have allowed Khrushchev to divert enormous numbers of men and resources away from the armed forces and into a Soviet economy that, barely having recovered from the war that had ended a decade earlier, was already beginning to stall under the inherent flaws in the Soviet command economy and the need to support a military that was still effectively on a war footing.
For Eisenhower, a treaty would have rendered into US federal law a means to limit the growth of the military-industrial complex and save the United States the expense of weapons that it
simply didn’t need; there were already more than enough nuclear weapons, should deterrence fail, to not just
defeat the Soviet Union but to completely
obliterate it. The number of nuclear weapons that the United States had aimed at the Soviet Union had already reached ludicrous proportions, way more than there were actual targets for, so much so that 179 had been allocated for Moscow alone, many of these multi-megaton hydrogen bombs, a single one of which would have vaporised everything within the vicinity of the city.
Ad Impetius Summa Absurdum.
Far from enhancing deterrence, ICBMs reduced it; in periods of high-tension, the enormous threat posed by ICMBs, combined with their vulnerability prior to launch as static targets in their silos,
invited surprise attack- the
very opposite of what was sought by deterrence. Eisenhower knew this, and understood that for the ICBMs to survive they would have to be maintained permanently on alert; on a hair trigger to launch at a moment’s notice or be destroyed on the ground by a Soviet attack that may have only been launched because of their fear of the very missiles meant to deter such an attack. It was a prospect that appalled him.
However, Eisenhower had been presented with an alternative strategy, and one that would have worked perfectly with a treaty banning intercontinental ballistic missiles.
On March 4th 1959, Admiral Arleigh Burke, Eisenhower’s Chief of Naval Operations, delivered a confidential memorandum proposing a
‘Finite Deterrence System’ in preference to what he termed a ‘
World Holocaust’.
“Views on Adequacy of U.S. Deterrent/Retaliatory Forces as Related to General and Limited War Capabilities” is a document of extraordinary clarity, in which the most critical issues concerning nuclear confrontation during the Cold War are succinctly put:
“…
it is the policy of the United States not to initiate a preventative war. Under these circumstances wherein the enemy will have launched his strike first it would appear to be of little value to concentrate U.S. resources on building up a tremendous capability to strike enemy military targets from which the aircraft and missiles have been launched.
To be effective at all, a United States strategy based on destroying the enemy’s retaliatory capability would require preventative war – in essence, a surprise attack. Also, it would require perfect intelligence on the location of all significant enemy targets. The decision to launch a world holocaust would be the most drastic and desperate decision made since civilisation began – and it might very well end civilisation. ”
“By having the capability to destroy the basic elements vital to Soviet life we do not have to maintain the tremendous retaliatory power which would be required to destroy all significant military targets.
The objective is not the people – it is the control structure and industrial complex operated by them. These elements can be destroyed by a successful attack on a finite and relatively small number of targets.”
“The problem is to build sufficient invulnerable forces – forces whose survival is insured no matter what the enemy does.”
“Another aspect of this future problem is that the enemy will know the location of our land-based missile sites. Our security system is simply not good enough to prevent disclosure of this information.
Invulnerability will exist only when the enemy does not know the location of our deterrent forces. This can only be achieved by true concealment and mobility. Both these factors are essential. The seas provide a natural environment for achieving both – no artificial means are required. The seas also offer the means of drawing enemy fire away from our continent – away from our population.
Invulnerability is a must in future in order to ensure inevitable retaliation. But, it is also important for other reasons… it certainly minimises the risk of hasty or ill-considered and irrevocable, disastrous decisions in time of international tension. ”
“In the coming years the ability to consider and weigh such decisions will increase in importance. When both sides have quantities of ballistic missiles, there may be periods of tension in which there are some indications that missiles might be launched by the enemy but these indications are not positive.
Our political leaders will then be in a quandary as to whether or not launch missiles before they are sure the enemy has launched its attack. If they wait, our ballistic missiles in known locations may be destroyed. If they launch on false information, we will have started a devastating war.”
So then, you
don’t need to build an enormous number of nuclear weapons targeting every known Soviet bomber and missile base
unless you were actively planning a surprise attack. Such an attack could not be guaranteed of absolute success and would result in a nuclear holocaust that threatened to destroy all of civilisation. What’s more, having a large land-based force only
increased the dangers brought on by international tension and, in addition, opened up the possibility of accidental nuclear war. Remember, this wasn’t a paper by some long-haired ‘
pinkco-loving peacenik’ Harvard professor, this was a proposal by the US navy’s Chief of Operations - a full admiral no less.
The alternative then, was what Admiral Burke termed Finite Deterrence:
“Our objectives can be assured by the selection of a target system which will include the most vulnerable and essential elements in Soviet life; that is, the control structure of their government and the Communist Party, and the industrial complex which is the foundation of their national power.
The USSR government and party controls, their industry and their war making capability are finite and so are the number of nuclear weapons and the numbers of delivery vehicles necessary to destroy them. Moreover, it does not require many megatons to destroy them.”
“As long as the U.S. has the capability of inflicting unacceptable damage to the enemy regardless of any efforts undertaken by him against the U.S. or its Allies, and the enemy knows we have and will use this capability, the deterrent is effective and the chances of a general war become less and less likely.”
Finite deterrence did not depend on land-based ICBMs, because their survival could not be assured. Nor did it require enormous numbers of nuclear weapons of any type; instead it used far fewer nuclear weapons, hidden and secure, guaranteed of surviving a Soviet first strike and then delivering a retaliatory blow that would bring down the Soviet dictatorship. A large number of Russian civilians would still be killed, but the United States would not be committing genocide.
If it had been adopted as United States nuclear strategy there would not have been the enormous build-up of land based nuclear missiles; those already deployed would have been phased out. The strategic bomber force would, in time, have probably been similarly phased out. Instead of a ‘
nuclear triad’, the US strategic nuclear force would have consisted entirely submarine launched ballistic missiles, on a small number of the
Polaris class nuclear missile boats that were at the time just entering service. These would have lurk somewhere under the polar ice cap. The US strategic nuclear force would then look something like the current nuclear force of Great Britain, presumably complete with an American analogue of the British submarine commander’s Letter of Last Resort.
Make no mistake, Admiral Burke was not proposing finite deterrence because of any trust in Soviet intentions or out of personal pacifistic ideals, even though the use of the term ‘
global holocaust’ makes it clear he was under no illusions as to what a nuclear war would be like; instead his proposed strategy the result of a logical analysis of the United States’ strategic situation and was meant apply American resources in the most optimum and efficient way possible in order to most effectively secure the nation’s future and that of its allies; you
don’t need to use 179 nuclear bombs to destroy what one, or at most two, can comfortably do. Instead, the excess resources that would otherwise have been devoted, pointlessly, to strategic nuclear warfare, could be redirected to the far more pressing requirements of fighting the smaller, regional wars that Burke noted were an ongoing feature of life in the Cold War.
But adoption of finite deterrence would have opened up the possibility of negotiating away all of the Soviet Union’s intercontinental ballistic missiles in exchange for the US abandoning something that was worthless anyway. In addition, because the United States would have been giving up far more ICBMs than the Soviet’s possessed, US negotiators could demand the Soviets give up something significant in return, perhaps mobile medium range missiles in Eastern Europe for instance.
So how would this have affected the Cold War?
The most obvious difference would have been the greatly reduced level of public anxiety. The vulnerability of land-based ICBMs was mitigated by adopting the policy of
Launch on Warning; placing strategic nuclear forces on a constant hair trigger, with a command system that could go from detecting an inbound Soviet attack to launching the missiles that would obliterate civilisation, perhaps extinguish the human race itself, all in less than twenty minutes. Without them that constant tension is greatly reduced. It would not be eliminated altogether; both sides would still have enormous inventories of shorter range nuclear missiles, submarine launched nuclear missiles and strategic bomber. The Iron Curtain in Europe would have remained particularly tense; with forces on both sides poised ready to blast the other into oblivion should they attempt to invade.
For Nikita Khrushchev, signing an agreement that abolished America’s disproportionate advantage in strategic nuclear weapons would have been a diplomatic triumph that would have boosted his grip on the politburo. But his triumph would have been short lived. Khrushchev needed a détente with the west, which this would have been unlikely to have led to; Admiral Burke proposed finite deterrence in order to direct more US military resources towards tactical military applications and for the Soviets that would mean more American tanks and aircraft on the border with their empire in Eastern Europe.
Nor would he have been likely to have built on his diplomatic success. Khrushchev was the product of the Bolshevik revolution and had climbed over the bodies of rivals to reach the highest echelons of Joseph Stalin’s court. There he had managed to survive for more than a decade in an environment in which any trust was betrayed and any weakness exploited; the result was acute paranoia and a tendency to compensate for inferiority with aggression. Hence his shouting and banging his shoe on his desk at the United Nations General Assembly. He desperately needed better relations with the West, but the only way he saw to get them was by making threats; if Eisenhower had proposed abolishing ICBMs Khrushchev would have concluded that this had only come about as a result of his tactics and would have become even more belligerent and bombastic on the world stage.
Any increase in resources and manpower that he pumped into the Soviet economy would have been unlikely to have made any significant difference. Khrushchev spent his entire premiership looking for the panacea that would cure the ills of the Leninist command economy that was ultimately doomed because of its fundamental systemic flaws. He had acquired barely three years of formal education, leaving him not only woefully ill-equipped to be the chief executive of a superpower, but also without the analytical skills to even to fully think through the consequences of his decisions. He was also thoroughly convinced that he knew more than anyone else on any subject (Nikita Khrushchev personified the Dunning-Kruger Effect). Hence his Virgin Lands initiative; Khrushchev’s solution to poor Soviet agricultural productivity by opening up vast new tracts of land in Siberia and Kazakhstan for wheat production, despite agricultural experts warning that the soils there would not sustain long term cultivation, and that the tractors, people and fertilisers required for the new development could only come at the expense of land already under cultivation. The result was a temporary bump in agricultural production and then a general decline in productivity as their soils were depleted and production in areas previously cultivated, with richer soils, declined because there was less men and machinery working them. Khrushchev couldn’t see that ‘
The Plan’ - the Soviet government’s vast plan, worked out in meticulous detail in Moscow and managed by a vast bureaucracy that employed more than five million people - was the principal reason that Soviet agricultural productivity in the 1950s was barely more than it had been in the 1920s, and why a country with more land suitable for cereal crops than the United States and Canada
combined was unable to feed its own population from 1960 onwards. Instead he harangued everyone about the need to grow corn instead of wheat, and that everyone should raise rabbits.
The most obvious change of events that a treaty would have produced would have been the absence of a Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis was the result of a Soviet attempt to overcome the American advantage in ICBMs in general by deploying intermediate and medium range missiles in Cuba. Without a massive US build-up of ICBMs, the politburo would have had no reason to gamble on basing offensive missiles in Cuba. This wouldn’t rule out any soviet troops or nuclear weapons being deployed to Cuba, it’s highly likely that forces equipped with nuclear weapons would still have been deployed to defend the Cuban revolution from an American invasion, just not missiles aimed at American mainland cities and military bases.
This change probably would not have seen Khrushchev’s premiership last any longer than it did historically; he was removed from power because his constant restructuring of the communist party was causing chaos and threatening the authority and power bases of the other members of the Politburo.
Significantly, without the shock of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and with a treaty in place, the Soviets would never have embarked on the massive build-up of ICBMs that they did from the late 1960s onwards. This wouldn’t have been enough to save the Soviet Union from collapse, that was systemically inevitable, but it may have delayed the collapse, and meant that the fall, when it came, wasn’t quite so far.
Finite deterrence would have significantly altered the theatre associated with the American presidency. In the Ancient Roman republic that America’s founding fathers modelled their republic on, the Consuls were escorted by lictors carrying fasces, a bundle of wooden rods bound around an axe, symbolising the Consul’s authority to order both corporal and capital punishment; the modern American version is an air force officer walking behind the president carrying the nuclear briefcase, commonly referred to as ‘
the football’. With finite deterrence and without land-based ICBMs, the nuclear briefcase becomes unnecessary.
The football’s purpose is twofold; its first purpose it to ensure that control of the nuclear arsenal remains at all times under the control of the nation’s highest civilian authority rather than the military. Its second purpose is to emphasise the enormous authority of the President of the United States, a task that only grew over the duration of the Cold War and was used to strengthen the incumbent president’s hand in international diplomacy and in domestic politics, and was why it is so clearly visible in numerous photo opportunities throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. If anyone doubts that this is pure theatre, they should look at president Ronal Reagan’s (that most theatrical of presidents) visit to Moscow in the summer of 1988; in news footage of Reagan and Gorbachev walking through Red Square, thrilling tourists and Muscovites alike, you can clearly see an American air force lieutenant colonel carrying the nuclear briefcase, walking a few paces behind the president in the heart of the capital of what was still America’s enemy.
Obviously the football’s second function is derived from its first, which is to maintain civilian control over the nation’s nuclear arsenal. This too is just so much theatrics. When Henry Kissinger called Daniel Ellsberg
the most dangerous man in America, it wasn’t because of what Ellsberg had revealed about Vietnam by leaking the Pentagon Papers, it was what Ellsberg knew about America’s nuclear command, and could
potentially reveal. From his work as a defence attaché in the Kennedy administration, Ellsberg had learnt that control over the nation’s nuclear weapons was delegated to an extraordinarily low level and that the only thing that prevented officers as low as air force majors or lieutenants from beginning a nuclear war was the pure habit obeying higher command and not acting on their own initiative, and that the military actively obstructed measures aimed at strengthening civilian control. When in 1962, Robert McNamara insisted on launch codes (more correctly:
the permissive action link) being introduced to prevent the unauthorised launch of a Minuteman missile, the air force followed orders and introduced them, but for the next twenty years the code used in all minuteman silos was a string of eight zeros; Strategic Air Command did not want anything potentially slowing down or interfering with the launch of a missile should the need arise; when the crews changed shifts, one of the checks that the incoming crew were required to do was check that all of the numbers were set to zero. This did not change until 1977, when a whistle blower, Dr Bruce G. Blair, leaked the story.
Even after 1977, the nuclear football was a fiction of pure theatre; US nuclear doctrine was one of
Launch on Alert; the ICBMs would be launched if a Soviet nuclear attack was confirmed as inbound. In theory the president would be notified and, using the nuclear briefcase to select a nuclear attack option, he would authorise the officer commanding the nation’s strategic nuclear forces to launch, and use a code he carried with him at all times to verify that it was indeed him issuing the order; all this in a matter of between ten and fifteen minutes, in circumstances where communications may already be difficult or impossible. In reality if he did not receive a reply from the president within sufficient time, the officer commanding the missile forces would simply have ordered the launch to prevent his missile forces being destroyed on the ground.
With Finite Deterrence the US would not have adopted a Launch on Alert doctrine; the very point of Finite Defence was to render such a doctrine completely unnecessary.
It is unfortunate then that Admiral Burke’s proposal, with its numerous clear advantages, became a victim of inter-service rivalry and the far greater lobbying power of the United States Air Force in Congress. The air force had beaten off the army for control of all nuclear missiles with a range of greater than a few hundred miles; those with ranges below this were considered
battlefield nuclear weapons and acceptable for the army to keep possession of, and viewed Burke’s idea as a thinly-veiled plot by the navy to become the sole custodian of the nation’s strategic nuclear weapons, and with them the lion’s share of the armed forces budget.
For the air force, finite deterrence was an anathema. It wasn’t just that finite deterrence meant a much reduced budget, fewer positions for senior officers and consequently reduced career opportunities for professional air force officers that generated opposition, it was also that the air force was dominated by men who did not consider it their mission to deter nuclear war; they saw it as their mission to fight,
and win, that nuclear war. This mentality was personified by the man that led them: General Curtis LeMay.
If anyone has ever wondered how the likes of Adolf Eichmann would have fared in the democracies, they need only look at the career of Curtis LeMay. LeMay spent the last year of the Second World War waging a war of extermination against the civilian population of Japan. One of the obstacles facing those tasked with fighting the strategic air campaign against Japan was finding industrial targets to bomb; of all the belligerent powers, japan was one of the least industrialised. LeMay solved the problem of identifying target by making the civilians the target; he made it his mission to obliterate Japan’s urban centres and exterminate their inhabitants, regardless of whether there was any military merit in doing so. He defended his strategy against those who saw it as an appalling crime by saying that
‘if it shortened the war by a single day it would be worth it’. He also claimed to be fully prepared to be executed as a war criminal if the Japanese won the war. It was a facetious claim to make; Japan’s strength had been broken well before LeMay began his bombing campaign and while there was still hard fighting ahead, there was no possibility of a Japanese victory.
After the war LeMay’s star continued to soar; he rose to command the air force’s entire strategic nuclear bomber and missile arsenal, the Strategic Air Command (SAC). He would be the generalissimo who led the United States’ forces to nuclear victory. Victory for LeMay was summed up by his deputy, General Thomas S. Power:
“At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left, we win!”
Nor was LeMay particularly keen to just wait around for war to start; in early 1961 he proposed to President Kennedy a pre-emptive (i.e. unprovoked and surprise attack) on the Soviet Union. This was followed up by the presentation of a plan for that attack on made to Kennedy on 20th July, 1961. Kennedy rejected each proposal, but did not remove LeMay from his command, an extraordinarily rash omission considering LeMay’s views and the power he commanded.
LeMay was SAC’s commanding officer, and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and was outspoken in seeing the crisis as America’s best opportunity to attack and destroy the Soviet Union. He considered the blockade to be
‘weak’. After the crisis was resolved peacefully, LeMay spent the rest of his life denouncing president Kennedy and the great opportunity that had been missed. It is amazing that LeMay didn’t simply take it upon himself to launch a war, he certainly had the means and power to do so; it seems that, like Eichmann, he was perfectly comfortable with killing uncountable millions, but only if ordered to do so.
Had Eisenhower, with his military prestige as the former World War Two Supreme Commander in Europe, thrown his weight behind Burke’s
Finite Deterrence and a treaty abolishing ICBMs, and made the case to the American public that this was the policy that made them safer and the threat of nuclear was the least, there is a very strong likelihood that it would have been adopted; the American public at the time shared their president’s fears of nuclear war. They probably would have been
absolutely terrified had they known that the commander of their nuclear forces was urging a surprise attack.
The United States still has more than 400 deployed Minuteman III missiles, and maintains a policy of
Launch on Warning in the event of attack.