Nuclear Age

The publication of a volume edited by Bernard Brodie, The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, in 1946 marked the first systematic attempt by specialists in international relations to think through the political and strategic implications of the nuclear age. Brodie and his colleagues—F. S. Dunn, P. E. Corbett, Arnold Wolfers, and W. T. R. Fox—sought to determine how warfare and international politics would be altered by nuclear weapons. Their findings pre-figured many of the themes that came up over the next several decades in scholarly and official analyses of nuclear arms. Brodie argued that nuclear weapons had made total war obsolete and that U.S. military strategy from then on would have to emphasize deterrence: "Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose" (p. 5). This view, which adumbrated the U.S.. shift to a declaratory policy of "massive retaliation" in the 1950s, was broadly accepted by the other contributors. Brodie and his colleagues left no doubt that, in their view, nuclear weapons had fundamentally changed the nature of world politics and military strategy.

The Soviet Union's acquisition of nuclear weapons in 1949, and the subsequent emergence of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear standoff, seemed to strengthen Brodie's basic point. Nonetheless, from an early stage, his thesis had many detractors. Some analysts argued that Brodie failed to take account of the importance of limited wars, such as those fought in Korea and Vietnam. In two highly acclaimed books, The Strategy of Conflict (1960) and Arms and Influence (1966), Thomas Schelling elaborated the theory of what he called "compellence," that is, the use of nuclear threats (and threats of the massive use of conventional weaponry) to coerce the adversary into taking a particular course of action. Schelling contended that nuclear deterrence did not eliminate the need for U.S. policymakers to deal with contingencies short of nuclear war and to think about how to use nuclear weapons to influence political and strategic outcomes.

Schelling also argued that even in relations between the two superpowers, strategy was not obsolete in the nuclear age. One of the other purposes of his books was to develop a better strategy for great-power competition within the context of deterrence. Schelling argued that deterrence of Soviet aggression in Europe or East Asia was crucially dependent on credibility. Unless the threat of retaliation was credible, Soviet leaders would have little reason to yield during a crisis. To cope with this problem, U.S. leaders, Schelling maintained, would have to demonstrate that they were prepared to act in ways that ordinarily would seem irrational. Schelling stressed that by actively preparing to carry out "threats that leave something to chance" (the title of a chapter in The Strategy of Conflict), U.S. policymakers would bolster their own credibility and thereby reduce the chance that they would ever be forced to make good on those threats.

Other analysts went a good deal further than Schelling in contesting Brodie's views about nuclear weapons. Strategic analysts such as Herman Kahn in the 1960s and Colin Gray in the 1970s and 1980s rejected the whole notion of an "absolute weapon." Kahn and Gray contended that even large-scale nuclear warfare between the two superpowers was not "unthinkable." They acknowledged that nuclear weapons might induce greater caution on the part of policymakers, but they stressed that this did not mean that the chance of war was zero. On the contrary, Kahn and Gray argued, there was a possibility that nuclear war would break out, and therefore they believed that U.S. policymakers must be prepared to fight such a war and to win it. Gray summed up this view in an article he coauthored in 1980 with Keith Payne. The article stressed that "the United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally" and must develop "a plausible theory of how to win a war or at least insure an acceptable end to a war." Gray and Payne urged the U.S. government to "plan Mushroom cloud caused by atomic bomb, Bikini Atoll, 1946. In the 1940s, scientists began experimenting with atomic devices—the first nuclear weapons—and the first controlled explosion took place in August, 1945, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. © CORBIS seriously for the actual conduct of nuclear war" and to develop a strategy "to defeat the Soviet Union and do so at a cost that would not prohibit U.S. recovery." As they saw it, a combination of robust strategic anti-missile and air defenses, a comprehensive civil defense program, and a large and diverse arsenal of nuclear missiles and bombers would ensure victory.

Not surprisingly, the views expressed by Kahn and Gray proved controversial. Stanley Kubrick satirized the nuclear war-fighting school in his 1964 film Dr. Strangelove. (Many viewers guessed that the title character was based on Kahn, but Kubrick never confirmed this.) More seriously, critics argued that theories of victory in a large-scale nuclear war rested on untenable assumptions about nuclear weapons and strategic defense technology. In a widely cited article published in early 1982, Wolfgang Panofsky and Spurgeon Keeny maintained that a "effective protection of the population against large-scale nuclear attack is not possible" and that an exchange involving only a few thousand of the more than fifty thousand nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and the Soviet Union "could destroy most of the urban population and destroy most of the industry of both sides." Even much smaller nuclear exchanges, they added, would have "very severe consequences." Nuclear war-winning strategies, in their view, were based on "wishful thinking."