Washington: Reagan's Mx Surprise

IN DECIDING NOT to place the MX missile on “racetracks” or in deceptive shelters throughout the American Southwest, the Reagan Administration did more than it intended to do. The President and his political advisers apparently based their choice on practicalities—the political resistance to the missile in Nevada and Utah, the growing cost, the uncertainties about how many new warheads the Soviet Union could build to attack the system. It would be easier on all counts, the administration decided, to build 100 MX missiles (half as many as the Carter Administration had planned) and begin placing them in shelters already built for older missiles.

But the result of such practical calculations may well be to transform the theories that loom so large in determining nuclear strategy. Indeed, despite every intention to the contrary, the administration may have succeeded in subverting the theory that has shaped American nuclear plans in recent years—and that contributed more than a little to Ronald Reagan’s election as President.

The theory in question concerns the “winnability” of nuclear wars. A school of thought has emerged to argue that nuclear warfare should be regarded not as mutual annihilation but rather as an exchange from which one side might emerge with significantly less damage than the other. In that sense, one side may be said to have “won” the war, even though both sides would be worse off than before the war began. In the same sense, according to this theory, nuclear weapons themselves must be thought of as militarily functional and useful, like mortars or tanks. They must be designed for use in controlled, gradated ways—to attack the enemy’s communication lines, for example, or his airfields—so that nuclear warfare need not be a spasm of destruction. The “war-fighting” view of nuclear strategy is opposed to the “deterrent” philosophy, which is that the only military function of nuclear weapons is to deliver an ultimate retaliatory blow—and by threatening to do so, to prevent both sides from resorting to their use.

When advanced by American authors, the implication of the warfighting theory has not been that the U.S. should prepare to launch and “win” a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Instead, they have argued that the Soviet Union is laying such plans and that we must be prepared to thwart them. The best way to do so, they conclude, is to build nuclear weapons that give us the full range of war-fighting options, so that no matter what the level of nuclear conflict, the U.S. could be confident of coming out on top.

The most consistent and articulate exponent of this theory has been Paul Nitze, who was on the team negotiating the first SALT treaty and is a consultant on arms control to the Reagan Administration. In 1956, Nitze published in Foreign Affairs an article called “Atoms, Strategy, and Policy,” which stands in total harmony with his positions of the subsequent twenty-five years. In that article, he explained why America must possess a refined nuclear war-fighting capability if it hoped to keep the peace:

The second meaning of the word “win,” the comparison between the postwar position of the victor and the defeated, brings out why it is also of the utmost importance that the West maintain a sufficient margin of superior capability so that if general war occurred we could “win” in the second sense. The greater that margin (and the more clearly the Communists understand that we have a margin), the less likely it is that nuclear war will ever occur. The greater that margin, the greater are our chances of seeing to it that nuclear war, if it does come, is fought rationally and that the resulting destruction is kept to the lowest levels feasible.

In that article, Nitze also introduced a distinction that takes the war-fighting view to its level of greatest sophistication. It is not necessary to believe that such a war will actually occur, he said, or that the Soviet Union would launch an attack once it had determined that it could “win” by emerging with fewer casualties. All that is required to shift the balance of international power is the recognition on both sides of what would happen if war should break out:

The situation is analogous to a game of chess. The atomic queens may never be brought into play; they may never actually take one of the opponent’s pieces. But the position of the atomic queens may still have a decisive bearing on which side can safely advance a limitedwar bishop or even a cold-war pawn. The advance of a cold-war pawn may even disclose a check of the opponent’s king by a well-positioned atomic queen.

In order to demonstrate that America might “lose” a war, despite its unquestioned ability to destroy the Soviet Union in a retaliatory strike, the war-fighting theory required that several conditions apply all at once. One was that the most important part of the American nuclear force be vulnerable to destruction in a surprise “first strike” by the Soviet Union. In the middle 1950s, when Nitze wrote his Foreign Affairs article, he discussed a threat to the bomber force. From the 1970s on, he and others have concentrated on the threat to the 1,000 missiles of the Minuteman force, which are located in underground “silos” throughout the Midwest. Those missiles now represent what the bombers represented in the 1950s: the principal American tool for destroying military targets, especially missile silos, in the Soviet Union. If we lose our land-based missiles to a surprise attack, the argument goes, we would have no alternative but to use our remaining, less-accurate weapons (such as missiles launched from submarines) in a suicidal counterattack on Moscow and Leningrad. It would be suicidal because the Russians would fire back at New York and Los Angeles; no rational leader would take the step that would mean his nation’s death. Instead, he would accept whatever terms the Soviet Union chose to dictate.

Although the war-fighting theory has been articulated throughout a generation, it reached its zenith in the past five years. Then it took the familiar form of the “window of vulnerability,” for which the MX system was the proposed solution. The “vulnerability” arose from the Soviet Union’s supposed ability, with its increasingly accurate missiles, to destroy our Minuteman force in a surprise attack involving some 2,000 warheads. “Window” referred to the gap of time until we could put corrective measures into effect. When the U.S. was in this “window,” the theory went, we would be in the sort of nuclear checkmate Paul Nitze described. If we undertook too daring a defense of our interests, the Soviet Union would point silently to its “atomic queen,” and we would prepare our pawns and rooks for retreat. Soon we would not dare even contemplate selfdefense.

There were a few dissents to the warfighters’ concept of a “window of vulnerability.” Some officials, such as Dean Rusk, pointed out that in the real world, as opposed to the land of theory, no President would sit still, rationally calculating his alternatives and holding his fire, as 2,000 atomic bombs exploded on American soil. Others, from the technical community, discussed the extreme uncertainties that would confront the Soviet Union as it contemplated a first strike: its national survival would depend on the outcome, but it would have no realistic evidence about whether its missiles would hit their targets, or whether the explosion of one warhead would deflect another, or whether the Americans would fire as soon as they saw the incoming missiles on their radar.

Nonetheless, the “window of vulnerability” dominated official thought and action during the late 1970s. The Carter Administration acknowledged the existence of the “window” when it approved the MX missile in 1979. Two hundred of these missiles were supposed to be rotated, in secret, among several thousand buried shelters, to reduce their vulnerability to Soviet attack. The missiles would also be more accurate than the Minuteman, which would theoretically improve America’s war-fighting capacity and make the Soviet Union worry about the vulnerability of its missile force. Republican military strategists contended that Carter’s decision, as always, was too late and too weak. The opponents of Carter’s foreign policy claimed that his timidity was proof that we were already “in the window.” It was this situation that candidate Reagan promised to rectify.

FOR SOME OF THE war-fighters, continued progress on the MX was not a sufficient answer. Nitze and several others recommended “quick fixes” that would close the window right away. These included starting up the Minuteman production lines and deploying more missiles in a hurry; hiding missiles among empty silos, as in a shell game; rapid production of new bombers or interceptors; fielding large numbers of smaller missiles, such as one puckishly known as “Midget Man”; and defending the Minuteman silos with “anti-ballistic missiles.”

It is safe to say that none of the warfighters imagined that they would get what Ronald Reagan finally gave them. The administration’s decision amounts to nothing less than dismissing the fundamental premise of the war-fighting theory. For the next few years, the MX missiles will go into existing silos, whose locations the Russians undoubtedly know. If we were vulnerable before the MX, we will be more vulnerable afterward, because a more powerful part of the nuclear force will be in these immovable, unconcealed silos. Despite all the cosmetic talk about protecting the missiles by “hardening” the silos (a step never regarded as serious before this announcement), despite all the promises to keep re-examining options, the plainest meaning of the decision is this: The President does not believe that “vulnerability” really matters. If he did, he could not in conscience have made this choice.

Perhaps the administration will eventually explain this policy away as a mistake or an aberration. But it seems at least as likely that the concept of vulnerability, and the war-fighting edifice that is built on top of it, have been permanently fractured. The idea of the Red Chinese menace never regained its full political potency once its most likely supporter, President Richard Nixon, recanted his belief in 1971. President Ronald Reagan’s actions cannot be dismissed as arising from an anti-defense bias; yet he has now recanted the most important element of the war-fighters’ creed.

“I believe you’ll see a series of aftershocks,” Larry Smith, a congressional assistant who has specialized in nuclear strategy for the past ten years, said at the time of the decision. “This theory won’t go away all at once.” He said that the aftershocks would come in stages, as follows:

In the first stage, immediately following the decision, the administration would try to explain how its decision was faithful to war-fighting doctrine and would close the window of vulnerability. Indeed, on the day of the decision, President Reagan was redefining “window of vulnerability” to mean the worldwide line-up of troops, ships, and tanks. In the following weeks, the administration put out a series of stories about improvements in their communications systems that would enhance America’s ability to fight—and win—a prolonged nuclear war. At the same time, those who had believed in the window of vulnerability, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were crying betrayal, and the spokesmen for arms control were contending that no MX should be built because it gave the Russians reason to fear a first strike.

In the next stage of reaction, Smith predicted, the administration would yearn for a solution that would seem consistent with its previous pronouncements about vulnerability, and would reconsider an anti-ballistic-missile system, reopening the bitter technical and strategic arguments about that subject. Later still, he said, administration officials would either explicitly declare the land-based missiles “survivable” or would shift their emphasis to the undersea force of Trident missiles and submarines.

“But after it all, the point of view represented by the war-fighters will be like Humpty Dumpty. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put it together again. Whether or not the theory itself ever made sense, practical realities will have overturned it.”

The demise of one theory does not automatically prepare the way for a more realistic and coherent policy on nuclear weapons or for a more acute appreciation of their dangers. But such developments may be easier in the absence of the war-fighting belief than in its presence.

—James Fallows