HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?
Slater, Jerome
There is an increasingly widespread feeling in Congress, among informed sectors of public opinion and, surprisingly, even among many strategic analysts, that U.S. nuclear forces have grown far...
...Under this assumption, of course, we have far too little for deterrence, not too much...
...But the MAD strategists rightly ignored these side effects of nuclear war, for in calculating the answer to the central problem of deterrence—how much is enough?—it is better to be conservative, to err on the side of safety...
...And of course the matter doesn't end there...
...But it is precisely this new technology, so deplored by our modern Luddites, that is opening up a rich new menu of strategic options to enhance our security and that, indeed, may even allow us ultimately to dispense with nuclear weapons altogether...
...Though seemingly fantastic today, such a force may well become a reality before the turn of the century...
...MIRVs are already deployed by U.S...
...Still further down the road is an even more revolutionary development: the deterrent force that hedges against the possibility that not even conventional warheads will explode in a retaliatory attack (remember that though conventional explosives have been with us for centuries, none have ever been fired on intercontinental missiles under wartime conditions...
...stockpile of strategic and tactical warheads was equivalent in destructive power to over 500,000 of the kind of mini-atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that our submarine forces alone could destroy every single city in the Soviet Union with a population exceeding 150,000, or that a single American B-52 carried more destructive power than all the weapons used in all the wars in human history, including the two atomic bombs dropped in Japan...
...Since the early 1970s, two major technological developments have made it possible vastly to expand the American force: multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs), and, soon to be deployed, cruise missiles...
...Indeed, we do seem to be a long way from McNamara's 300-warhead calculations...
...These calculations, then, underlay the American nuclear-force buildup in the 1960s...
...A cruise missile force of everal million (with no warheads) would be ideal or Slingshot Deterrence...
...Again, this is nothing but sound, conservative, and prudent analysis: we need to hedge against the possibility that the Soviets might develop a technology that would enable them to destroy one or even two components of the Triad in a surprise attack...
...MAD is a product of the mid-1960s, particularly of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara...
...uildup and simultaneously provide a final answer o the classic, heretofore unanswerable question: -low Much Is Enough...
...The key point is that each component of the Triad must separately be capable of carrying out assured destruction...
...Our current buildup, then, is a hedge against the contingency—unlikely, to be sure, but prudence requires we guard against it— that our nuclear warheads may not work in time of war...
...According to some estimates, by the 1990s :ruise missiles may cost as little as a few hundred collars each, and could be fired from an ordinary artillery piece...
...Our purpose, of course, is not to be able to kill every Russian 20 times over, but simply to kill every Russian once (not even every one, actually), and to really make sure...
...However popular this view may be, it is quite wrong...
...nuclear warheads impacting on Soviet targets would provide the required "assured destruction...
...Given the :onvergence of a range of technologies, for :xample, cruise missiles will inevitably become ;mailer, lighter, and more versatile, and will soon )enefit from the cost efficiencies of mass producion...
...By now, one can see that a force of many thousands of nuclear warheads, dispersed in a wide variety of delivery systems, is necessary—not merely 300...
...The hope in the Pentagon is that with the advent of increasingly accurate long-range missiles, we may soon be able to substitute conventional warheads on them and, with sufficient numbers, still be able to destroy at least 25 percent of the Soviet population and 50 4 percent of its industry...
...Cruise missiles are vastly updated V-2 German buzzbombs: essentially small, unmanned aircraft, but now—thanks to revolutionary advances in terrain-matching navigation, engine propulsion, electronics, and explosives miniaturization, computer technology, and the like—capable of flying thousands of miles at high speed and very low altitudes and delivering nuclear warheads with amazing accuracy, perhaps soon to within 10 yards of their targets...
...The elegance of this, of course, is its utter simplicity: we need not rely for our safety on highly complicated technology that conceivably could fail us in the crunch, only on the time-tested law of gravity...
...By the early 1970s the United States had a force of some 3,000 nuclear warheads, not counting, of course, those on aircraft carriers and European bases...
...Naturally, in making these calculations it was once again necessary to adopt conservative estimates: that the Soviet strike would work very well, and that large numbers of our forces would be destroyed...
...nuclear forces have grown far beyond any rational purpose, that we have far more than we need for deterrence—that, as it sometimes is vulgarly put, our strategy is one of "overkill...
...Naturally, this adds many more to the assureddestruction requirement...
...Prudence further requires that we assume that many of our missiles will abort on launch, others will be shot down or malfunction on route, still others will miss their intended targets, and so on...
...it reflects a frighteningly unsophisticated assessment of the mutual deterrence relation of the United States and the Soviet Union...
...The figures may seem somewhat arbitrary, but they were based in part on the fact that the Soviet Union in World War II "accepted" some 20 million deaths and widespread material devastation, yet survived and recovered to become a superpower in rather short order...
...For brevity's sake, I will adopt this acronym here, but certainly without pejorative connotations...
...therefore we had to have a force that even after a surprise attack by the Soviet Union targeted directly on our nuclear forces would still be capable of delivering 300 warheads on Soviet targets...
...Although rhetorically effective, this misses the point...
...Of course, the expense of the massive new )uildup of long-range missiles necessary for Slingshot Deterrence would be considerable, but lot as much as it might first appear...
...Moreover, this destruction would result only from the immediate effects of nuclear attack—blast, fire, short-term fallout...
...Therefore we do not count them as part of our MAD forces...
...Enough" is a sufficient lumber of missiles to kill at least 50 million tussians and destroy at least 50 percent of Soviet ndustry even if not a single missile actually .xplodes...
...No doubt this will require missiles numbering in the hundreds of thousands rather than tens of thousands, but would not the abolition of nuclear warheads justify the cost...
...Computer analysis demonstrated that some 300 U.S...
...At this point, there will be no ,ractical limit on the numbers of cruise missiles hat could be produced...
...For MAD purposes, we count only 3 the ICBMs, the SLBMs, and the bombers, which together form the "Triad...
...Though all these latter forces are capable of delivering nuclear weapons on Soviet territory, most can do so only on one-way missions, and in any case we prefer to think of those forces as tactical rather than strategic—i.e., designed for battlefield use rather than long-range retaliation...
...McNamara's reasoning was that we should design an American nuclear force capable of deterring any Soviet attack against either the United States or Europe so long as Soviet leaders were even minimally rational...
...We might call this "Slingshot Deterrence...
...The current American strategic posture is one of mutual assured destruction: lately critics have labeled this "MAD...
...Now we can see the key to the current U.S...
...Of course, far more were necessary...
...forces, so that our present force structure consists of some 9,000 strategic nuclear warheads, larger and considerably more accurate than the earlier models, and about 7,000 tactical nuclear warheads (although they of course don't count for MAD purposes, as explained earlier...
...MIRVs, simply put, allow us to put from 3 to 15 separately targeted hydrogen bombs on each ICBM and SLBM...
...Critics made much of the fact that the U.S...
...Why, it was asked, did we need enough destructive power to kill every Russian 20 times over...
...In addition, we have some 15 aircraft carriers with 100 or so fighterbombers aboard, and many thousands of shorterrange missiles and aircraft based in Western Europe...
...With a sufficient number of long-range missiles, we can kill 25 percent of the Soviet population and destroy 50 percent of its industry through the sheer weight of falling objects...
...The nightmare of our force planners, whose crucial responsibility it is to make "worse-case assumptions," is that because we have never actually fired nuclear-armed missiles under operational conditions, we cannot be certain they will work...
...To begin with, it is not really true that a force of even 20,000 nuclear weapons is sufficient to deter...
...Seen in this light, far from being xcessive, far from embodying "overkill," the urrent U.S...
...To begin with, our forces are designed on the assumption, in the main, that they will be used only in retaliation...
...The truth is that our security requires far, far more strategic forces than we now have...
...The key assumption of the McNamara analysis was that an American force that would kill at least 25 percent of the Soviet population and destroy 50 percent of its industrial capacity would meet this criterion...
...Of course, there have been thousands of successful tests of nuclear warheads, and hundreds of testfirings of long-range missiles, but it is a well-known principle of military science that testing under simulated wartime conditions, no matter how realistic one tries to make it, is simply no substitute for the real thing...
...Even at that point there were cries of "overkill...
...Now it might be assumed on the basis of these estimates that a force of 300 strategic nuclear weapons would suffice...
...Second, it must be remembered that we do not have just one strategic nuclear force, but at least three and some would say four: land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and intercontinental bombers...
...in reality, of course, there would be a great deal of bonus damage from the longer-range effects of starvation, disease, exposure, radiation poisoning, economic breakdown, social disorganization, and the like...
...force structure is woefully inadequate, ;nd can be justified only if it is the first step toward trategies and force structures that will truly ;uarantee our national security...
...Actually, this was a conservative assessment, since some analyses showed that 300 well-placed warheads would kill one-third of the Soviet population and destroy up to 75 percent of its industry...
...And it is here that we see the true importance of the current American missile buildup, for it is laying the basis for a wholly new strategy: assured destruction without any explosions at all, nuclear or conventional...
...Hence, each arm of our retaliatory force must be capable of riding out an effective Soviet attack and still delivering the 25 to 50 percent assured destruction...
...THESE DEVELOPMENTS, existing and imminent, have revived unsophisticated notions of technology run amok, or weapons built as if for their own sweet sake rather than to serve a rational strategic purpose, of forces far beyond those necessary for MAD purposes no matter how conservatively estimated...
...To ensure that at least 300 would be left, we had to have a force many times that size...
...Cruise missiles are not yet deployed, but by 1980 or 1981 we will begin the first of a planned, 11,000 airlaunched, nuclear-armed force...
Vol. 27 • January 1980 • No. 1
