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NUCLEAR STRATEGY _ AT THE CROSSROADS Charles A. Appleby I? 1957, Henry Kissinger argued that, "Perhaps the basic problem of strategy in the nuclear age is how to establish a relationship between a policy of deterrence and a strategy for fighting a nuclear war in case deterrence fails." Developing a strategy which provides both an adequate deterrent to attack and a rational defense in the event deterrence fails has challenged statesmen, strategists, and military planners since the dawn of the nuclear age. This dilemma between deterrence and defense can best be illustrated by discussing the two major schools of deterrence strategy in the United States: deterrence through societal punishment and deterrence through victory denial. The punishment strategy places primary emphasis on massive societal destruction to deter the outbreak ofnuclear war. According to this school, any attempt to limit nuclear reprisals or generate selective responses against military (counterforce) targets runs the risk of depreciating deterrence by reducing the costs of initiating an attack. The punishment strategy does not rely on matching an adversary's nuclear forces; rather, the emphasis is on assuring unacceptable damage to the opponent's population and industry (countervalue targets) following a worst-case surprise attack against the nation's retaliatory forces. Thus, even a relatively small number ofinvulnerable nuclear weapons might be adequate for a deterrent strategy based on societal punishment. The denial school ofdeterrence gives precedence to military targets such as missile silos and command and control centers. This targeting policy, known as damage limitation, is alleged to enhance deterrence by denying the adversary the possibility of military victory, as well as limiting damage to the homeland in the event deterrence fails. Charles A. Appleby is a candidate for the MA. degree at SAIS, and serves as a research assistant at the World Bank. A former naval officer assigned to nuclear submarines, he has also worked with the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. 69 70 SAIS REVIEW Members of the denial school view reliance on societal punishment as an irrational and even immoral response to the failure of deterrence. This school has traditionally favored superiority or, at minimum, rough equivalence vis-à-vis an adversary's nuclear forces. It is recognized that there are a thousand shades of gray between the two schools. Further, U.S. strategy has never been linked exclusively to either extreme. For purposes of argumentation, the punishment school will be referred to as the assured destruction school and the denial advocates will be called the war-fighting school. Bernard Brodie in The Absolute Weapon (1946) laid the foundation for the assured destruction school in arguing that nuclear weapons would make deterrence , not war-fighting, the primary function of military force. The war-fighting school, on the other hand, has never fully supported the proposition that atomic weapons have fundamentally altered the nature ofwar. One ofthe earliest statements ofthe war-fighting philosophy can be found in The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report (Pacific Summary) (1946) which asserts that the threat ofretaliation is not an absolute deterrent and should therefore be complemented by a rational strategy to fight a war if deterrence fails. The deterrence-defense dilemma is manifested in three recurring problems which have faced strategists throughout the nuclear era, including those who drafted our current "countervailing" strategy as announced to the world in August 1980 in Presidential Directive 59 (PD-59). The first problem concerns the vulnerability of our strategic forces to a Soviet first strike. The vulnerability debate has traditionally arisen during projected gaps between the strategic forces of the United States and the Soviet Union. The bomber gap (1955-1956) and the missile gap (1957-1961) are two of the most familiar historical examples. More recent is the prediction by a large body of analysts that the 1980s will contain a period of vulnerability during which the Soviet Union could theoretically destroy more than 90 percent of the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force. Quantitative superiority, it is often argued, makes one side vulnerable to a potential disarming first strike, leaving the target nation with few options other than surrender or launching a suicidal retaliatory strike. A strategy ofdeterrence through punishment is implicitly less concerned with...

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