NUTS AND THE TRIUMPH OF PRISONER’S DILEMMA LOGIC
Despite both the US and the Soviet development of sufficiently powerful nuclear weapons that could withstand a first strike by the late 1960s, and the ensuing agreement to SALT I, which resolved any trace of a Prisoner’s Dilemma, military hard-liners continued to press for the replacement of assured destruction with escalation dominance.[252] Fearing the incredibility of deterrence predicated on recognizing an inherent limit on the constructive purposes of thermonuclear weapons, US leaders were not satisfied to have nuclear or conventional military parity.
Rather than accept the obsolescence of large-scale war in light of the reciprocal fear of uncontrollable escalation into mutual annihilation and the increasing superfluity of perpetrating violence at other levels of engagement, the United States sought to preserve the prerogative to engage in effective armed combat at all levels of conflict. By 1980, President Carter solidified the US policy as maintaining escalation control, or escalation dominance, not just in prolonged nuclear contestation but also amid all military rivalry.Carter’s adoption of the countervailing strategy can be traced back to National Security Defense Memorandum 242 (NSDM-242), which PD 59 mentions and supersedes.[253] This earlier document, signed by President Nixon, with James R. Schlesinger at the helm of his Department of Defense, on January 17, 1974, directed that further plans “for limited employment options which enable the United States to conduct selected nuclear operations” be developed and formally incorporated into the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). While the public debate over NSDM-242 focused on its “reemphasis” on counterforce targeting, the SIOP had, since 1962 and including the period when assured destruction became avowed US policy, already contained most of these targets.
Strategists acknowledge that the novelty of the NSDM-242 lay in “the notion of targeting those Soviet assets that would be critical to Soviet postwar recovery and power.”[254] This meant that even though the pro-nuclear- use strategy seemed to win the moral upper hand by removing civilian populations from nuclear targeting, the intention was, in fact, to place these population centers on hold for ultimate extermination if warranted to undermine the Soviets’ prospects of recovery.The strategic rationale for the decision at the core of NSDM-242 not to give priority to population centers as targets was the concept of “escalation control,” defined as the maintenance of “our capability to effectively withhold
attacks from additional hostage targets vital to enemy leaders, thus limiting the level and scope of violence by threatening subsequent destruction.”[255] Operational planning for this new guidance meant providing the National Command Authorities (NCA) the ability to execute options in a controlled and deliberate manner, to “hold some vital enemy targets hostage to subsequent destruction,” and to control “the timing and pace of attack execution, in order to provide the enemy opportunities to consider his actions” so that “the best possible outcome” might be achieved for the United States and its allies.[256] For these purposes, NSDM-242 introduced the concepts of “withholds” and “nontargets.” Centers of Soviet political leadership and control, for instance, would be withheld from destruction for the purpose of interwar deterrence and bargaining, whereas “population per se” had now been exempted absolutely from targeting - oddly enough, given that the definition of assured destruction rested on the ability to wipe out 33 percent of the Soviet Union’s population in a second strike.[257] [258] The capitulation of MAD to NUTS, therefore, depended on finding the stance of reciprocal deterrence incredible because massive retaliation would be immoral and thus pointless in the case of deterrent failure. However, retaliation could be moral in case it was intended as a constructive remedy on the path to US victory.
Surely, strategists concluded, the United States could increase its chances of recovering more quickly than the Soviets.Driven by the new reality of rough strategic equality, the United States changed its formal targeting criterion for Assured Destruction from the destruction of Soviet urban-industrial centers to the prevention of the Soviet Union’s gaining any advantage from a nuclear exchange, that is, from recovering, economically or militarily, more rapidly than the United States after a nuclear war. As Secretary of Defense Harold Brown later expressed in 1981, according to the logic of this new strategic plan, American strategic nuclear forces were designed to cripple the military and political power of the Soviet state, not strictly its industry and people.12 The US military planners refused to concede a reciprocal deterrent footing to the Soviets. They openly pursued a stance of ascendance consistent with both the Prisoner’s Dilemma model of security and the arms race and the Chicken game representation of bargaining. Even though moving the United States to a footing that accepted entering into and winning a protracted nuclear conflict drawn out over “weeks or months” was a decisive extension of the flexible response originally implemented by Schlesinger, still its logic was entailed in NSDM-242.[259]