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allow us to know which enemy sites were empty and which were being prepared
for refire; and with the Polaris force having insufficient accuracy for
anything other than a countervalue strike, flexible response took on a note of
irony.
Soviet Strategic Doctrine
[Table of Contents]
In contrast to the United States, it would appear that the U.S.S.R. adopted a
policy of Assured
Survival. That is, the Soviets installed substantial defenses and counterforce
weapons to limit
damage from U.S. retaliation. While such counterforce capabilities are
consistent with
development of an "out of the blue" first strike capability, they also allow
the Soviets more
flexibility in responding to escalating tensions. Under some post-strike
conditions the U.S. might
be self-deterred from retaliating at all.
Whether they have been successful in this policy may be questionable, but the
point is that they chose a reasonable strategy while our professed strategy
led to deployment decisions that forced us into a posture that was the
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opposite of what we intended.
Presumably the Soviets have been unable to guarantee that U.S. retaliation
will not bring destruction above the deterrent level. On the other hand, since
the United States has conceded the initiative of striking first, the Soviets
do not need to be overly concerned about the U.S. policy of
Assured Destruction: the level of destruction is essentially a function of the
level of success in the first strike. The lack of U.S. active defenses
augmented the chances that such success might
be considerable, and made it unnecessary to use any large part of the Soviet
strategic budget for development of penetration systems.
(Footnote 3)
They could and did concentrate on large payload capacity, accuracy
improvement, and sheer numbers of offensive weapons, hoping to exploit their
numbers and large payloads more fully when multiple reentry vehicle technology
was adequately developed. The rest of their budget could go to testing and
development of
strategic defense, to which they traditionally have allocated huge resources.
Requirements of Assured Survival
[Table of Contents]
The United States has never developed an actual policy of Assured Survival.
The Safeguard
defensive system, abandoned after the ABM treaty, was intended to protect the
SOF, not our people. Although President Reagan clearly intended the Strategic
Defense Initiative as a means
of protecting the American people, our strategies and doctrines are still
based on a policy of
Assured Destruction, and to the extent that there is bi-partisan support for
SDI it is largely built around the protection of our SOF.
Defense of the strategic retaliatory force is, of course, better than no
defense at all; but the moral objections to Mutual Assured Destruction are
unchanged by deployment of weapons intended solely to protect missile fields.
In any event, the requirements for Mutual Assured Destruction are no less
dynamic than those for Assured Survival. Deterrence through MAD is not
automatic. In 1970 we pointed out at least
one way that deterrence could fail through nuclear blackmail.
US strategic nuclear forces are offensive only. Suppose, then, a Soviet attack
directed solely
against our strategic force, with the intent of reducing the assured
destruction that our damaged force, further reduced by Soviet defenses, would
be able to accomplish. The result might well be
that the President would question whether the surviving force would be
sufficient to destroy the enemy's war-making capability.
The Soviets could then point out that the launch of our surviving force would
be suicide for unprotected U.S. cities. The Soviet commanders would, of
course, have held back hardened and
mobile forces sufficient to destroy many American cities, using their
soft-based and reloadable
ICBM installations in the initial strike. Our president would be faced with a
most difficult moral
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choice. He could either launch the SOF against Soviet industry and population
centers or
surrender. Doubtless, the surrender terms would be made easy to accept --
initially. Whatever
happened to the United States, Europe would have no choice but surrender.
Because the United States concedes the first strike to the Soviet Union,
Assured Survival is a policy more expensive for us than for the enemy. We must
have an Assured Destruction
capability as a part of Assured Survival; but we must also have active
defenses and forces capable of defeating the enemy in nuclear aerospace
battle.
(Footnote 9)
The most pressing military problem of the free world is to provide active
defense against the strategic striking power of any would-be aggressor. Active
defense is also the most technically difficult of the
current military problems. It becomes no easier with time; the longer defense
technology is held
back, the more difficult the problem becomes because offensive power is
growing. Yet strategic
analysis indicates that a strategy of Assured Survival will be far more
valuable to the free world than one of Assured Destruction.
There are two basic methods to provide Assured Survival. The first,
construction of a force
sufficient to destroy the enemy striking force in a preventive attack, is not
feasible for an open society; if it were constructed it could not be launched
by Western statesmen without severe provocation. Even a preemptive strike
appears to be very difficult. The problem, it should be
noted, is not symmetrical. A secretive society without scruples about
aggression can achieve a
decisive first strike capability far more readily than an open and peaceful
government.
U.S. SOF systems are openly deployed after years of debate in Congress. Their
nature, numbers,
and locations can be known with considerable confidence. By contrast the
U.S.S.R. can build
and deploy weapons whose very existence is only speculation in the West.
Furthermore, U.S. concession of the first strike to the other side allows the
Soviets to employ large missiles launched from soft pads. Thus to say the
United States may be unable, given the
present state of weapons technology and sociological factors, to achieve a
full counterforce capability is not the same as saying that the Soviets cannot
achieve it.
Note that in the above analysis we say nothing of intentions. As we write this
the Gorbachev regime appears to be interested in reduction of strategic forces
and the achievement of nuclear stability. We would be more convinced of this
if the Soviet Union did not continue to maintain
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four separate missile production lines running at full capacity to produce
ICBM's; but even if we assume that the current Soviet leadership sincerely
desires peace and detente, it may not be desirable to bet the survival of the
United States on the stability of the Gorbachev regime.
The second method of achieving Assured Survival is through active defense,
coupled with sufficient counterforce capability to threaten the enemy's
residual or holdback forces. Active
defense also serves to prevent destruction or extensive damage to the United
States by a third power. In fact, an adequate program of active defense will
ensure that, whatever our capability
against the U.S.S.R., the American people will not be hostage to anyone else.
There are at
present no other powers capable of overcoming the defenses we could construct
with present technology, and by the time others achieved penetration
capability the United States could easily update the system to accommodate new
technology. There are other benefits to active defense. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]