Russia and World War III

...Blitzkrieg in a general nuclear war, despite the much greater power of a surprise strike, necessarily involves unassumable risks...

...Since 1953, Garthoff explains, Soviet strategy has been adjusted, though not revolutionized...

...Soviet doctrine is repugnant because it is unscrupulous about the use of force and deceit, but such tactics are means to broader political ends...

...Those who fear a Communist surprise attack imagine that they have reasoned it out on the basis of Communist doctrine, but the actual Soviet application of Marxism, as Garthoff notes, is quite the contrary...

...He cautiously informs us, after more than a dozen years of cold war and national anxiety about containing and deterring the Russians, that the guiding American assumptions about future Soviet strategy have been entirely wrong...

...In Stalin's time Soviet military leaders were practically forbidden to think about nuclear warfare, even though the Ministry of "Medium Machine Construction" was successfully developing atomic weapons...

...Reviewed by Robert Vincent Daniels Associate Professor of History, University of Vermont WHEN THE ACTIONS of statesmen are viewed with a few years of historical perspective, they are revealed all too often to be precarious improvisations, guided by a mixture of immediate realism and incredibly erroneous notions of what is really going on in the world...

...The obvious retort to this picture of the Soviet stance of Machiavellian defensiveness is that it is merely propaganda to deceive the outside world and soften it up for a surprise attack...

...Neither the Korean experience, the called bluff of Dienbienphu, nor a succession of protest resignations in the Army high command seem to have awakened the Eisenhower Administration to the need for tactics somewhere between the good-will mission and the threat of total annihilation —i.e., the capacity to use limited force against specific threats...

...Yet this image of Communist intentions is unsupported...

...Soviet strategy was shackled to the experience of World War II, and it concentrated on the problem of defense against a surprise attack through a prolonged land campaign of mass armies culminating in a victorious Soviet counter-offensive...

...The Russians had discovered, they imagined, that they could now "deter" the U.S., and to drive the point home they even began to threaten "pre-emptive attack" against anyone preparing to attack them...

...The ultimate irony of our era is that the Russians, gripped by the same fear of us that we have had of them, have come around to adopting our own strategy of deterrence...

...Forestalling Pearl Harbor by threatening to return to Hiroshima is the position of the strange alliance which has dominated American strategic thinking ever since 1945: penny-pinching politicians and overenthusiastic Air Force generals with high-powered public relations...

...Adventurism,' or the taking of unnecessary risks," Garthoff writes, "is a cardinal sin in Bolshevism...

...In the present volume of three modest essays (to which are appended translations of three recent Soviet articles on military doctrine), as in his more substantial Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age, Garthoff demonstrates that Soviet military thought—insofar as it is publicly articulated—sets little store by the theories of European blitzkrieg or nuclear knockout which have haunted American strategic planners ever since the cold war began...

...the Communists have no Hitlerian commitment to total violence as an end in itself...

...A more specific factor is the infantile fixation on the traumatic experiences of World War II, which this country shares with Russia...

...Just such astonishing limitations can we find in the grave matter of the United States' understanding of the political intentions of the Soviet Union, to say nothing of the Soviet view of America...

...would initiate a nuclear war and risk mutual destruction...

...Since Soviet military thinking is actually so much at variance with American assumptions about that thinking, it is natural to inquire how these assumptions were established...

...Both countries were victims of surprise attacks in 1941, both are determined to prevent the recurrence of such a debacle, and both are captivated with the economical magic of the weapon which brought World War II to a close and which would allegedly frighten all aggressors away from our shores...

...Stalin was obviously obsessed with avoiding a repetition of the near-disaster of 1941, and in the light of this his clumsy policy of land-grabbing after 1945 becomes more intelligible...

...In part, as writers of Hans Morgen-thau's Chicago school argue, it is the product of America's tradition of moralistic isolation followed by abrupt precipitation into the stresses of bi-polar power rivalry, plus the irrational panic about domestic Communism...

...We have had a long run of literature committed to the proposition that the Soviets are plotting just that, in accordance with some master timetable...

...Raymond Garthoff is a political scientist and Defense Department consultant who has specialized in the study of Soviet military thinking...

...George Kennan has remarked (NL, November 16, 1959): "How little men really understand of their own predicaments and of the true implications of their own enthusiasms and actions...

...This is a crude description, but the crudity of the actual American strategy of 1945-1950 and American strategic talk from 1950 to the present deserve it...

...Stalin's demise made it possible to square Soviet military doctrine with modern nuclear realities...

...Marxism emphasizes the underlying economic potential, not the swift political gamble...

...Furthermore, it had become obvious by 1954 that Soviet progress in nuclear weapons had made it highly unlikely that the U.S...

...There is no evidence that secret Soviet thinking departs in any material way from published doctrine, which sets the terms in which literally everything must be communicated in the Communist system...