How Unlikely Is War?

...The NATO coalition today is in the position of a man who may have to fight a duel in which his antagonist will have the choice of weapons...

...But there is no reassurance in this for Europeans, and least of all for Germans, who want to know what stands between them and the Soviet tank armies...

...Nor was there much comfort for continental Europeans in the recent speech of the British Prime Minister opening a foreign affairs debate in the House of Commons...

...To put the matter more concretely, the Soviet Union could engage in a localized war in the Middle East or Central Europe without risk to its own homeland, because American and British fear for their homelands would deter them from resorting to unrestricted long-range nuclear warfare...

...In the three years that have elapsed since then, the sense of military danger in the West has so far decreased that it has even become customary to speak of the "cold war" as a thing of the past and of the threat of military force as something that has now been banished from practical politics...

...Indeed, it is only natural for a soldier to advocate concentration on the most powerful weapon in the armory without considering whether in a crisis it would be politically possible to use it...

...In that case, the nation which relies entirely on nuclear weapons for the defense of itself and its allies will be in the position of having either to wage war on the terms laid down by the aggressor or by its own deliberate choice to extend the war into what are now called "the upper registers of military power" with all the terrible consequences for its own people which that must entail...

...Hence in America what the New York Times recently described as "the apparently unchecked drift of national policy toward a one-weapon doctrine—reliance on the hydrogen and lesser nuclear weapons to deter war...

...the danger of it, he said, had receded and was receding...

...It would save them a lot of trouble...

...War, conceived as a simultaneous all-out exchange of huge A-bomb and H-bomb explosions, seems to have become too destructive in its recoil for any nation, however aggressively minded, to find it worthwhile as a means of policy...

...In such circumstances, a government will be under very strong moral pressure to confine the war to those lower registers within which the aggressor has chosen to operate...

...The only risks and costs to be estimated are those of the limited war itself...

...If the Western nations and their allies want security, they must be ready to meet challenges to war on the ground with tactical atomic weapons, tanks, guns and properly trained (but not too many) combat troops...

...But if the defenders, relying on nuclear arms for "massive retaliation," have neglected or cut down their military strength in the lower registers, so that they have become decisively inferior to the aggressor in that sphere, then they must accept defeat and settle on the victor's terms without ever having used the vast apparatus of massive retaliation in which they have placed their trust...

...Territorially limited warfare with tactical atomic weapons does not threaten the aggressor with the devastation of his own homeland...

...The question of whether full-scale nuclear retaliation is really feasible in any but the most extreme circumstances is one of a political and psychological order on which military specialists are not particularly qualified to judge...

...In comparison with this development, the impressive reductions in infantry manpower recently announced by the Soviet Union are of little or no importance, even if they are fully carried out...

...It does not rule out the possibility of war as a factor in human affairs, but sets free local military superiorities which were previously held in check by the atomic monopoly of the other side...

...Atomic cannon have not put an end to land warfare: they have merely intensified tendencies which were already operative in the Second World War...

...The nuclear weapons and the establishment needed for using them will be expensive, but far less expensive or absorbent of manpower than the old "conventional" armed forces: we can therefore reduce our military budgets and cut or abolish conscription...

...His only safety is in being able both to shoot and to fence, in which case he will probably not have to fight at all, but, if he does, will have a reasonable chance of survival...

...Unfortunately, at this time when an intelligently planned reorganization of defense forces to meet the new conditions is urgently necessary, there is an immense confusion of thought on the subject both in America and in Britain, extending from the general public to the highest political quarters...

...But fear of the consequences would probably be too great to allow this—at any rate by the West...

...But all this frightfulness is only cover for the ground forces which alone can conquer and occupy territory...

...But Russia's achievement of comparable nuclear power has diminished the deterrent in proportion as the would-be retaliator is forced to realize that he cannot escape in his own territory a large measure of the ruin which he will inflict...

...Unfortunately, it holds out little prospect of making military preparedness less expensive, for it becomes more necessary than ever to develop adequate tank forces as the main fighting arm, and these are much greater devourers of money than ordinary infantry...

...Although since the termination of active hostilities in Korea and Indo-China there has no longer been any considerable armed conflict between the two camps, and although the more supple Soviet tactics of the post-Stalin era have to some extent softened the asperities of the Soviet-Western relations of five years ago, there has been no real settlement of any outstanding issue, and in some respects, notably in the Middle East, Soviet actions have actually created new tensions within the past year...

...What is the justification for the belief that the possibility of war has somehow overnight been exorcised from international relations...

...There can be no deterrence or security against such threats except a comparable strength on the ground to engage the enemy...

...He entirely ignored the possibility of limited warfare in which neither side would invoke this "final destructive effect," and though he was unwilling to promise any drastic cuts in defense expenditure, his speech was certainly the opposite of what would have been required to reconcile the British people to the cost of a qualitatively more formidable, even if numerically smaller, British army...

...Such views naturally find advocates among specialists in the nuclear arms and commend themselves to politicians who are looking for votes...

...In other words, how is containment of the Communist power bloc to be continued under conditions of nuclear stalemate...

...Yet quite a different situation must arise if the aggression is not initially an atomic one, or at least not an all-out one with strategic bombing of cities far from the fighting front...

...This new kind of war would render it possible and indeed desirable to reduce the actual numbers of men in the army...

...It would put a premium on highly mobile and dispersed ground forces, needing less manpower but an even higher degree of specialized training and mechanization than at present, and depending on supply from the air rather than on old-fashioned rail and road communications...

...A defender of Radford's alleged plans would presumably argue that they do not involve any abandonment of NATO allies because they will render the Strategic Air Command still better able to protect Western Europe by the threat of massive retaliation...

...The question is not, of course, whether these weapons are terrible—their destructive powers are beyond dispute—but whether in a given contingency they would actually be used...

...The NATO countries, which still have jointly a substantial productive superiority over the Soviet bloc, can have such strength, but only if they will face the fact that they must pay for it...

...They could, of course, be wrong in their calculation and plunge the world into unlimited nuclear catastrophe without intending to do so...

...But if deterrence by the threat of massive retaliation is not really a practical proposition except against direct attack on the United States, how is American policy to cope with "creeping conquest" of other parts of the world by Communist powers—a process which, if it went far enough, would in the end isolate the United States and place it in a situation of strategic inferiority even against direct attack...

...Unless some surprise were complete and virtually all counterattack installations immediately destroyed, the attack would provoke a frightful retaliation on the aggressor country, and the hazard would be too great for any but the most reckless of dictators to undertake...

...In America the views on defense policy of which Admiral Radford appears to have become the champion are threatening the whole conception of NATO as an alliance in which the armies of the Western European democracies are assured of the close support of American ground forces...

...an excess of infantry is in any case only an encumbrance in the new type of land warfare...

...There is ample evidence that Soviet military preparations are now directed toward insuring a military superiority for localized land warfare while at the same time building up a nuclear striking power sufficient to provide massive retaliation against massive retaliation and thus to cover the localized operations...

...The effect of the nuclear stalemate, therefore, is just the opposite of what it is popularly supposed to be...

...An article in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of the USSR declares: "Reports in Krasnaya Zvezda and other Soviet journals on military training and tactical exercises are clear evidence of the significance attributed by the Soviet leaders to tank formations in atomic warfare conditions...

...However, even conventional armaments need to be modified in the atomic age if tactical atomic weapons (as distinct from the arms of full-scale strategic nuclear warfare) are likely to be used...

...How are we to find a way between what another contributor to this volume calls "the Scylla of nuclear holocaust and the Charybdis of interminable retreat...

...But the new Western optimism is mainly due to a different cause, namely the inference that the possession by both sides of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons has created such capacities for mutual annihilation that neither antagonist will dare to launch a war which could not fail to involve it in appalling devastation of its own territory...

...If the aggressor thinks he can win such a limited war, he can embark on it in the confident belief that strategic nuclear weapons will not be used against him as long as he does not use them first...

...The West must have strategic nuclear power to match that of the potential enemy, but it will be sheer folly to rely on it as a substitute for adequate ground forces to defend threatened frontiers...

...Nuclear stalemate has made 'conventional' wars more likely —— and we are poorly prepared By G. F Hudson London At the time of Stalin's death, there was among the nations of the West an acute sense of military danger...

...In the years after the war, while the United States still retained its monopoly of the atomic bomb, the Soviet Union kept up a great military superiority on the ground by holding enormous numbers of men under arms in its land forces...

...He argues irresistibly that "the value of the objective sought" must be related in war to "the costs involved in its attainment" and that a policy of deterrence which disregards this relation can result only in "deterring the deterrer...

...The unpleasant truth is, however, that NATO has never yet succeeded in providing a really adequate defense for Western Europe and that reliance on the strategic use of nuclear weapons as an infallible deterrent, with consequent neglect of the ground forces available for land warfare, can only make matters worse...

...It has not been any fundamental modification in the professed aims or the attitudes of the Communist powers...

...He points out that a theory of war which would convert every local conflict into an all-out global war of annihilation can only produce a revulsion of feeling so great as to allow capitulation on local issues rather than resort to the ultimate challenge...

...The danger of a swift rush of Soviet tank armies to Teheran and Baghdad or to Bonn and Paris is not less, but more, than it was five years ago...

...At the end of 1955 there were reports of an increase of approximately 50 per cent in the number of tanks in Soviet tank and mechanized divisions...

...The atomic bomb was indeed a deterrent when America had a monopoly of it...

...But will they deter...

...He declared that it was impossible to imagine a global war without the full use of atomic and hydrogen weapons and that he had been encouraged to believe in their deterrent capacity by the fact that during the Khrushchev-Bulganin visits in the spring "the Soviet leaders accepted, as we accepted, the final destructive effect of nuclear power...

...The meaning that Admiral Radford's critics read into this was a sharp downgrading of the collective security system, a disregard of allies and an almost total reliance on nuclear weapons for coping with any kind of aggression, large or small...

...There wrould always be the possibility that the losing side would seek to redress its reverses by bringing strategic nuclear weapons into action...

...Today the Soviet Union is ready, if required, to engage America in long-range bombardment with all known weapons, and Marshal Zhukov reported to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party that "in organizing our armed forces we base our calculations, as distinct from the past, on the need for mass use of air forces, of varied ballistic missiles and of different methods of mass destruction—atomic, chemical and bacteriological...

...It is quite out of the character of the American people, he declares, "for us to retaliate massively against anyone except in the face of provocations as extreme as Pearl Harbor...

...But such an attack, an atomic Pearl Harbor, though not impossible, must be considered the least likely form of future war...

...The unmitigated hostility of the Communist states and the experience of the Korean War had created an awareness of the strategic threat from the Sino-Soviet bloc and a will to oppose it which had resulted in the organization of NATO...

...If the current assumption that the danger of war has disappeared had no basis but the intermittent bonhomie of Mr...

...It has become necessary, therefore, for military planning authorities to prepare, for two or three quite different kinds of warfare without knowing in advance which they may be called upon to fight...

...Large cuts in defense expenditure can only be obtained if a nation altogether abandons the attempt to create effective land forces and relies exclusively on strategic nuclear weapons and their delivery systems...

...There are now three possibilities: war with conventional weapons alone, all-out nuclear war with maximum use of H-bombs against the home territories of the antagonists, and a third, intermediate type in which the use of conventional land forces would be combined with the employment of tactical atomic weapons within a restricted zone of operations...

...It does limit war, but limited wars become more rather than less likely...

...if he cannot fence, his opponent will choose swords...

...Clement Davies, the Liberal party leader, drew the natural conclusion from the Prime Minister's glowing optimism when he said that "the dispersal of the clouds of war" was bound to lead to a great reduction in the arms budget...

...the new weapons have rendered all other kinds of armaments out of date and therefore the latter can now be discarded...

...Such a state of affairs obviously complicates to a painful degree the task facing those who bear the responsibility for providing for national and inter-Allied defense...

...the deterrent effect of the strategic nuclear weapons is therefore absent...

...Under these conditions, the contest would be fought out with conventional forces (tanks, aircraft and infantry in dispersed units) plus atomic artillery, and the side with the better all-round development of the arms involved would win...

...The so-called "nuclear stalemate" is, therefore, seen as the salvation of mankind...

...But this brings us back to massive retaliation and its unsuitability as a means of either deterrence or counteraction against aggression across land frontiers...

...This traditional conception, however, was already modified with the introduction of poison gas...

...The answer is that if any one nation does in fact maintain both at a high level, it will have a decisive strategic advantage over all those who do not...

...The editor of this book, William W. Kaufman, protests against "the despair, the futility and the recklessness" implied in the doctrine of massive retaliation and demands "reasonable and tolerable substitutes...

...it was not used...

...If he cannot shoot, his apponent will choose pistols...

...The weakness of the West on the ground becomes a standing temptation to the Soviet rulers to use force to an extent which they may calculate would be insufficient to provoke full-scale nuclear retaliation from America and Britain...

...The problem is new in kind because it has always hitherto been assumed in military theory that all available arms of an effective character would be used in war, so that peacetime military preparations could be planned with reference to only one type of war...

...They would certainly be used by any nation which possessed them in reply to direct, all-out nuclear attack...

...This is a pleasing and comforting idea, and it is no wonder that it has become popular, for not only does it hold out an unprecedented hope of eliminating war from human affairs, but it also appears to promise a lightening of the burdens of national armaments...

...If Soviet mechanized striking forces are to be strengthened and improved, it does not matter if half the former Soviet infantry force are demobilized...

...But it is a task they cannot evade if they are to be faithful to their trust...

...The problems involved in this dilemma have been analyzed with great clarity and relevance in the collection of essays recently publised under the title of Military Policy and National Security and based on a research program of the Center of International Studies at Princeton...

...There is still, it is held, a Soviet menace, but in the future it will take only political and economic forms and will have to be met on these levels...

...He spoke of his "growing conviction that a war in Europe is unlikely...

...It becomes increasingly improbable that any of the Western democracies will ever embark on full-scale nuclear warfare except in response to full-scale nuclear attack...

...If a nation defending itself or its ally counters an attack of conventional forces by use of nuclear weapons, or if it counters an attack delivered with only tactical atomic weapons by resort to long-range strategic bombing with nuclear and thermonuclear explosives, it incurs the responsibility in the eyes of the world for extending the war into the upper registers, further than the enemy desires to carry it...

...All that is needed to keep the peace, so the argument runs, is a sufficient supply of nuclear weapons to deter any would-be aggressor with the certainty of a devastating reprisal...

...Khrushchev at conferences and receptions and the good-will missions of Russian dancers, acrobats and clowns on this side of the Iron Curtain, it would be an astonishing triumph of Soviet publicity to have achieved so much with so little...

...But it is plainly to their advantage to limit wars if they can and conquer territory by local military superiority while the long-distance bombers of both sides with their loads of hydrogen bombs remain in leash on their airfields...

...The situation is all the more difficult to clarify because it is no longer possible for the Government's professional military advisers to present final estimates of strategic needs on which the civilian leaders can then make up their minds, taking account of political and economic considerations...

...According to the New York Times: "The question that has emerged is whether the proposal of Admiral Radford would really mean neo-isolationism and the withdrawal of the bulk of this country's overseas forces to a Fortress America...

...It is generally agreed that this third form of warfare precludes great concentrations of infantry in the style of past wars...

...Between the First and Second World Wars, all the principal military powers trained and equipped chemical-warfare units and gave anti-gas drill to their soldiers and sailors in case gas should be used in the next war, but they could not know whether it would be used or not...

...The possibilities of a Blitzkrieg with fast-moving armored forces have become greater than ever before...

...If they cannot face this prospect, they might as well at once give up the idea of being independent nations and invite Khrushchev to take over their governments...

...The triumphant claim of the British Foreign Secretary after the Geneva "summit" conference last year that "there ain't gonna be no war" has come to be more and more widely accepted, and is now having its logical effect in the party politics of the NATO countries: While Iceland has elected a Parliamentary majority pledged to getting rid of a base vital to the NATO strategic system on the ground that there is no longer any danger of war, there is in Britain a growing movement in favor of relieving the difficulties of an inflationary economic situation by drastic cuts in defense expenditure...

...Since the introduction of nuclear weapons, we are confronted with a form of warfare which may or may not be used in a future armed conflict, or at any rate may or may not be used to the full extent of which it is capable...

...the ability of each side to hurl weapons of mass destruction at the other has become as great a guarantee of peace as if both were to possess some technique of absolutely impenetrable defense which would enable them to live in security behind impassable frontiers...

...Even in the United States, where expectations of a new warless era have not spread nearly so far as in Europe, an election year has produced strong pressure for budgetary economies at the expense of the armed forces...

...it was probably the decisive factor in dissuading Stalin from resort to armed hostilities during the blockade of Berlin or the quarrel with Tito...

...The advocates of the one-weapon doctrine, however, tell us that even the wealthiest nations cannot afford to maintain both nuclear and conventional armaments...