EARLY US RESPONSES TO STRATEGIC NUCLEAR PARITY
As the 1960s dragged to their conclusion, and Vietnam stood as an indictment of US military ineptitude on the world stage, the US conservative policy wing formed around the figures of Kahn, Wohlstetter, and Paul Nitze and became energetically revitalized.
The liberals, who had wielded power for almost a decade, had presided over military fiasco and the embarrassment of the United States. However, no strategist could alter the fact that both superpowers had the destructive power to eliminate the other as a viable nation-state. Thus, viewed from a wider lens, the Cold War was unfolding according to this simple logic of Assured Destruction, assuming that the superpowers had achieved parity as a consequence of the hydrogen bomb.From 1964 to the late 1970s, the Soviet Union added significantly to its offensive nuclear forces, changing the Soviet-American strategic nuclear balance from one of American superiority to one of parity, or even Soviet superiority.[233] In concrete terms, the Soviet Union moved from a position in which it could inflict 30 million fatalities on the United States in a second strike to one where it could inflict roughly 100-140 million; by comparison, the fatalities that the United States could inflict on the Soviet Union remained constant at 100-120 million.[234] However, consistent with MAD logic of mutual deterrence, the United States did not contest the Soviet buildup. Instead, the two states first signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) in 1972, freezing the number of ballistic missile launchers, and went on to sign the SALT II treaty in June 1979, placing a common ceiling of 2400 on each side’s total number of delivery vehicles (ICBM launchers, SLBM [submarine- launched ballistic missile] launchers, and long-range bombers).[235]
Given its options, the United States had little choice but to accept nuclear parity.
To maintain its 1964 ratio of superiority over the Soviets, the United States would have needed 12,000 delivery vehicles and more than 50,000 warheads (when the two sides formally agreed to the 2,400-vehicle limit, the Soviets actually had 2,504 deployed delivery vehicles and 6,000 warheads, whereas the United States had 2,058 vehicles and 9,200 warheads).[236] And even if the United States were willing to pay the costs required to build such a force, it could not have maintained its strategic nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union in terms of military consequence - that is, the actual amount of death and destruction a nuclear war would produce on any given set of targets. As Secretary of Defense McNamara underscored with his “curve” in 1965, the act of dropping nuclear weapons on an enemy is subject to diminishing returns: there are only so many meaningful urban-industrial targets in a country. Thus, the destruction of 33 percent of the population and 66 percent of the industry of the Soviet Union became the figures identified with assured destruction simply because the allocation of additional forces to hit further target sets yielded only the death and destruction of sheep, cows, trees, grass, and insects and comparatively few Soviet citizens and factories.[237]Nevertheless, some argued that a substantial buildup of US offensive nuclear forces would have salvaged a measure of American superiority by buttressing its damage-limiting, counterforce capabilities. This argument has little merit, however. Even if the United States had employed 50,000 warheads (maintaining its 1964 ratio) and launched all of them in a first strike against Soviet ICBMs and bomber bases, Soviet SLBMs would still survive, as there was no certain way to destroy them. Moreover, the Soviet Union would surely offset such a massive preemptive strike against its land forces by means of a “launch on warning” strategy. The futility of a first strike of any kind - no matter how massive or unexpected - is, after all, the essential logic of MAD and should, therefore, surprise no one.
Arguably, assured destruction should have obviated both Schelling’s fear of reciprocal attack and the need to engage in an arms race. The United States and the USSR entered into arms control talks in 1969 and concluded SALT I in 1972, leading Douglas Lackey to observe that this served as “proof that by 1972 the nuclear arms race had ceased to be a Prisoner’s Dilemma.”[238] Lackey explains:
In a genuine Prisoner’s Dilemma, when two parties are co-operating, the benefits of unilateral defection (to the defector) are greater than the benefits to each of mutual cooperation, while the penalty of being the second to defect is worse than the penalty for mutual noncooperation. In 1972, the advantages of defecting from cooperation (building more offensive missile launchers, building an ABM [anti-ballistic missile] when the opponent has one) were in fact less than the penalties to both of both built more ABMs and more offensive weapons.[239]
Thus, the actual configuration of force options at the close of the 1960s removed the positive payoff of being the lone defector from an arms control treaty, leaving the lone arms racer to spend more on nuclear armaments than their value could offer in effective destructive power. The Prisoner’s Dilemma payoff matrix ceased to apply because it seemed impossible to reasonably evaluate that either the potential for surprise attack or the possibility for winning an arms race was feasible.
Strategists agree that an offensive approach to nuclear security will inevitably be self-defeating.[240] In a discussion of the international relations security dilemma, defensive realist Shiping Tang observes:
Both [John] Mearsheimer (2001) and [Dale] Copeland (2000) explicitly acknowledge not only the existence of the security dilemma but also the impact of nuclear weapons on state behavior. For Mearsheimer, nuclear weapons make global hegemony seem impossible. Likewise, Copeland emphasized that nuclear weapons mean that preventative war by a reigning hegemon is no longer a viable option, and a far more plausible scenario will be that a reigning hegemon initiates crises in order to forestall the growth of a rising power... Nuclear weapons are generally understood as the ultimate weapons that have brought defense [vs. offense] dominance to international politics (Jervis 1989).[241] [242]
Both theorists who deny that mutual security can be a realistic goal among nation states under any circumstances (Mearsheimer and Copeland) and those who hold the opposite view (Schelling, Jervis, Tang) agree that nuclear weapons cannot be constructively deployed, even by a hegemon.112 This, however, did not stop NUTS from winning not only the academic debate over nuclear policy but also the actual policy debate.