Still from the first fusion test explosion – detonation of Castle Bravo, 1st March 1954, Bikini Atoll (Source: Wikipedia)
In the background of the history of the early days of the Soviet nuclear program there are early Cold War spy stories worthy of the novels of John le Carre. From the desertion of Igor Guzenko at the USSR Embassy in Ottawa, which happened shortly after the end of the war in the Pacific (and the completely unbelievable treatment of him by the Canadian authorities, which in the first instance, for the sake of proper relations with their ally, intended to hand him over to the Soviets), through the resulting detection of a Soviet spy (Alan Nunn May) in the ranks of scientists working for the British nuclear weapons development program code-named Tube Alloys (Tube Alloys was finally merged with the American Manhattan project in August 1943, under the Quebec Agreement), to the famous case of the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs, or the Venona Project, a counterintelligence operation that ultimately led to the destruction of spy networks operating in the US and Great Britain (the Cambridge Five). Incidentally, the detection of Alan May as a spy led to a breach of the Quebec deal and the passing of the so-called McMahon Act, and the consequent exclusion of Great Britain (and all other countries) from the exchange of information on nuclear weapons. Ultimately, the United Kingdom and the United States, developing their own nuclear programs independently of each other, returned to close cooperation in the late 1950s with the signing in 1958 of the Mutual Defense Agreement, which is in force to this day. And here it was not without tensions, such as the Skybolt Crisis in the early 1960s, resulting from the premature termination of the United States’ ALBM Skybolt missile development program; eventually, in return, the United States made the UGM-27 Polaris SLBM available to the British. Today, the SLBM Trident II D-5 missiles (Polaris’ successor), manufactured in the USA and “leased” by London, constitute the nuclear deterrent power of the United Kingdom. To conclude the side stories, let us add that the prosecutor in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case was Roy Cohn, then a young lawyer, who also played a role in the infamous hearings organised by Senator McCarthy. Later, in the 1970s, Cohn was the attorney – and mentor – of a certain Donald Trump. Small world.
But back to our rams; the surprise of the faster-than-expected development of the Soviet nuclear program was somewhat symptomatic of the unsteadiness experienced by Americans during the Cold War, in particular with regard to Washington’s alleged advantages and weaknesses vis-a-vis Moscow – just to mention the “bomber gap” or “missile gap” – where the Americans too hastily assumed that the Soviets were approaching parity or were even ahead of the US, whether in terms of the number of strategic bombers or the advancement of the ICBM program.
The loss of the monopoly on nuclear weapons complicated the already difficult planning for its hypothetical use, also forcing Americans to “run forward” – and thus seek further advantage in controlling the higher rungs of the escalation ladder. The advantage was, of course, supposed to be the “super” – a thermonuclear bomb. Although in retrospect the decision to start work on a new, much more destructive version of nuclear weapons seems obvious, in its time it aroused a lot of controversy, leading not only to a schism among scientists dealing with nuclear weapons, but also – perhaps against the intentions of some critics of “super” – to attempts to try and operationalise “tactical” nuclear weapons.
While the decision to launch a program to create a thermonuclear bomb was ultimately obvious to President Truman (when deciding to authorise the program, Truman was only to ask, “Will the Soviets be able to produce it?” On hearing an affirmative answer, Truman was to say that in that case the US “has no choice.”), many of the physicists responsible for the Manhattan program had an extremely different opinion on this subject. This led to disputes in, nomen omen, the core of the agency responsible for both the development of nuclear weapons and the warheads themselves, i.e. the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission, also established under the McMahon Act. By the way, the fact that AEC was a civilian agency once again manifests a certain tension between civilian and military circles with regard to the control of nuclear weapons). Some physicists, led by Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence, were outspoken supporters of the development of the super program, in which they were seconded by Lewis Strauss, at that time vice-chairman of the AEC. On the other hand, some of the “old guard” responsible for the success of the Manhattan Project were unequivocally opposed to developing thermonuclear weapons; Oppenheimer himself and Enrico Fermi belonged to this group. This opposition to the “super” was concentrated in the General Advisory Committee (GAC, the advisory body operating within the AEC structures).
Oppenheimer, a melancholy character, seems to have been deeply shaken by the destructive power of a weapon in whose creation he contributed significantly; This is evidenced by his now iconic words, spoken after the Trinity test (“I have become death; destroyer of worlds”). There are many interesting threads connected with this argument, to mention only the AEC physicist John Wheeler, who lost in 1953 an almost complete documentation of a hydrogen bomb while traveling in a couchette; the author, on the other hand, will focus only on the conclusion that the opponents of the “super” bomb, in trying to dissuade Washington from continuing the nuclear bomb project, raised arguments that, although heard in a sense by the Truman administration, did not achieve the desired effect.
GAC and Oppenheimer, instead of investing in the development of “super”, proposed the development and hypothetical use of smaller, tactical nuclear weapons. On the one hand, the proponents of this solution postponed the terrifying vision of full nuclear exchange; on the other hand, they lowered the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, thereby risking an uncontrolled escalation that would end up in open, full-scale nuclear war anyway. Oppenheimer favoured the use of NSNW (non-strategic nuclear weapons), expressing the hope that thanks to the “tactification” of nuclear weapons, they would be used on the battlefield, and not, as in the strategic bombing paradigm, against the enemy’s cities and industrial facilities. This would therefore be a departure from the paradigm of total war, characterised by counter-value strikes, in favour of counter-force strikes against concentrations of enemy forces. Prior to this, as Viner put it, in the realities of nuclear war, a frontline soldier was less likely to fall victim to a nuclear bomb than his wife and children behind the front lines.
Oppenheimer, Kennan, and Vannevar Bush’s attempts to push the “atomic genie” back into the bottle had a paradoxical effect: in the end, the “super” inevitably came into being anyway. However, their argument for using smaller tactical payloads was also noticed. A 1951 study titled Project Vista proposed just such use of nuclear weapons, concluding that tactical nuclear weapons, combined with less conventional forces than would be needed in a bomb-free world, would be able to stop Soviet aggression on Western Europe.
Dilemmas related to the “super”, proposals for greater reliance on tactical nuclear weapons, and finally the end of the American advantage over the Soviets in terms of nuclear weapons, which was becoming more and more clear on the horizon, resulted in attempts to domesticate the problem of the place of nuclear weapons in the Soviet deterrence strategies in the Old Continent. The most well publicized attempt of this kind was the document known as NSC-68. The document presented to President Truman in April 1950 and drawn up by the National Security Council presented the conflict between the USSR and the USA as being of a permanent, structural nature. According to its authors, a possible outbreak of war would not have to be a result of a miscalculation or misreading of strategic communication, but it could also be a deliberate action by the Kremlin. NSC-68 also suggests not only that the Soviets could be the first to use nuclear weapons, but also that the totalitarian regime makes using them much more “natural” than the Americans – especially since the first massive nuclear strike would have to come as a surprise. This, in turn, meant that nuclear weapons rewarded the aggressor in a way – and the aggressor in the Cold War paradigm was the Soviets. Above all, NSC-68 advocated the expansion of conventional capabilities in Europe, thus attempting to reduce NATO and the United States’ dependence on nuclear weapons, while concluding that until the West’s conventional capacity is significantly increased, nuclear weapons – possibly tactical – should be a key part of the US instrumentation; Moreover, Washington should be ready to use it first.
It is worth adding here that the credibility of the use, and thus the deterrent value of nuclear weapons, suffered as a result of the course of the Korean War, which, let us add, broke out after NSC-68 was presented to Truman, but before it was signed by the 33rd US President (this happened in September 1950). After the initial success of the operation initiated by the landing of troops led by General MacArthur at Inchon, undertaken under the aegis of the United Nations, China entered the war, resulting in a stalemate. Criticism faced by MacArthur’s suggestion to consider the use of nuclear weapons (which was one of the factors that ultimately led to his dismissal), technical problems with its use (both the selection of appropriate targets and the terrain that hinders its effective use, similar to Nagasaki. There was also a problem with the range of bombers that would have problems reaching targets beyond the Yalu River), and allies’ concerns (for example, Great Britain) that the use of nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula would provoke the Soviets to use them in Europe, called attention to the inherent political – not military – dimension of the use of nuclear weapons. Anyway, the Americans were so concerned with the prospects of violating the nuclear taboo that was just emerging that they excluded Curtis LeMay – the then SAC commander – from the delegation going to South Korea at the beginning of 1951, due to his reputation as the “nuclear cowboy”. It turned out that Comrade Mao might have been right when he stated in 1946 that “the atomic bomb is a paper tiger that American reactionaries use to scare people – it looks terrible, but it is not. Of course, nuclear weapons are a tool of mass murder, but the outcome of a war is determined by the people, not by one weapon or another.”
The moral, political and practical difficulties of the use of nuclear weapons allow a better understanding of the attempts by the Truman administration to move away from, at least in part, excessive reliance on nuclear weapons later in his presidency.
Thus, while the US would like nuclear weapons to be a cheaper replacement for conventional presence, the Korean War would highlight nuclear taboos and the unpreparedness for the “first use” of nuclear weapons for warfare. One possible way to resolve the unreliability of the use of nuclear weapons was to shift the burden to of retaining credibility Soviets by increasing a conventional presence in Europe. This would also prevent the opponent from using surprise or a wrong assessment of the situation – as was the case with the outbreak of the war in Korea (the famous lapse of Dean Acheson, who in one of his speeches forgot to mention South Korea as a country covered by American security guarantees) and China’s involvement in the conflict.
However, supplementing NATO’s conventional forces to a level sufficient to authenticate deterrence to the Soviets was virtually impossible for the Western world. At the end of the 1940s, the USSR had around 2.5-2.8 million soldiers amongst its land forces (according to the calculations from the era, after 1956, 26 Soviet divisions were stationed in the GDR, Poland and Hungary. Another 75 divisions were stationed in the European part of Russia, another 40-125 divisions could, according to American planners, be mobilised within 30 days. In addition, the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries could deploy about 60 divisions. For comparison: in 1949, the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Benelux countries could jointly deploy in Europe about 12 divisions; a year later, the North Atlantic Treaty states adopted the goal of deploying 34 divisions, while Washington itself pledged to increase its commitment to four divisions. In 1952, in Lisbon, NATO set itself the ambitious goal of creating 50 active and 46 reserve divisions. Increasing the conventional presence was understandable from all sides – but the problem was that the estimated cost of creating a conventional force capacity to counter the Soviet attack was valued at $30-40 billion at the time. By comparison: the Marshall Plan was $12 billion; the annual US defense budget was $13 billion at the time. According to Dean Acheson, the implementation of the NSC-68 demands would have cost $50 billion in total. There were also economic problems in post-war Europe, such as the devaluation of the pound in 1949. It was clear that the United States, faced with the problem of “security or solvency”, would not be able to afford not to use the “great equaliser of opportunities”, i.e. nuclear weapons, which played the same role in relations between the USSR and the USA that the Samuel Colt mechanism performed in the Wild West.
The early 1950s are therefore the era of tactical weapons development: in 1951, artillery shells equipped with a nuclear warhead were developed; since 1953, not only bombers, but also fighter planes could carry nuclear bombs. Even nuclear air-to-air missiles armed with warheads were created, amongst other marvelously insane contraptions, the likes of the Davy Crockett Weapon System. It seems that the essence of the strategy proposed by Truman in the early 1950s was thus deterrence by denial, and the concept of a “limited war”, assuming that in the European theater, nuclear weapons would be used in a gradual way, and its aim would be to counter-force groups of the enemy troops, especially in the early stages of the conflict. The advantage of this type of deterrence denial) was its greater credibility, than in the case of using nuclear weapons in “deterrence by punishment” mode, against population centers (counter-value).
Proponents of limited war have suggested that this very form of the use of nuclear weapons combines the advantages of both deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment – because in the end, the use of nuclear weapons, even tactical ones, would obviously result in a generous dose of punishment as well. Finally, the use of tactical weapons, according to some, was supposed to favour defence, as the threat of using them would force large groups of enemy forces to disperse. However, this is where the problems begin, because, as noted by Vladimir Rezun (better known under the pseudonym Viktor Suvorov) in the book Tatiana, the Soviets could consider offensive use of tactical nuclear weapons in order to break the enemy’s defence lines. This, in turn, highlighted another problem, noticed by Bernard Brodie among others – that if both sides found it legitimate to use tactical nuclear weapons, the result would be mutual destruction. “As a result, by waging a war with tactical nuclear weapons, in the end, we still get the totally nihilistic result that we would get with strategic nuclear weapons.” Finally, it should be noted that planning a limited war with tactical warheads required the assumption that the Russians would be gentlemanly following the rules of the game, much like the rules of the Marquis of Queensberry. This assumption was risky as the Russians had a much smaller nuclear potential at their disposal, so maintaining the conflict at the level of using only tactical counter-force weapons would work to their disadvantage. The Russians therefore had every reason to reject these theories and to threaten the West with the possibility of an uncontrolled escalation. This is what Khrushchev seemed to communicate when rejecting in 1957 “the theories of the so-called limited war emerging in the West … nowadays regional war is nothing but the first stage of another world war.” In other words, in this tango – and probably all the others – it took two. Finally, the Russians were also to consider the strategy of “hugging” – that is, quickly shortening the distance at which Soviet forces fought NATO troops, thus preventing the use of nuclear weapons.
Conclusively, it is worth noting that even if the primary target were groups of enemy troops, civilians would also suffer as a result of conventional operations supported by the use of tactical nuclear weapons – and that in the event of a hypothetical conflict in Europe, it would take place in the western part of the continent as the Soviets would be the aggressors. It was therefore legitimate to ask if those who were to be protected by US nuclear weapons wished for it at all. The scale of this problem was illustrated by two war games conducted by NATO. The first, Sagebrush exercise in 1955, simulated a war with the use of tactical weapons in an area the size of Greece and Portugal. The conclusions from Sagebrush – during which the use of around 70 nuclear bombs, each less than 40 kilotons each, was modeled – were clear: as a result of detonation, life in the area affected by hostilities “ceased to exist”. The second exercise depicted a two-day campaign in West Germany, during which 355 nuclear warheads were detonated; 1.7 million Germans would lose their lives, and 3.5 million would be injured.
With the end of the presidency of Harry Truman, the election of Dwight Eisenhower as the 34th president of the United States, and the first-ever thermonuclear trial (Castle Bravo) that took place shortly thereafter, Washington began moving away from the vision of a limited war, in favour of a strategy of mass retaliation – the Solarium Project, conclusions from which were included in the document called NSC 162/2, and in Eisenhower’s “New Look” policy.
Autor
Albert Świdziński
Director of Analysis at Strategy&Future.
Strategy&Future
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