of MAD as an explicit concept did not end the nuclear debate in either the United States or the Soviet Union. Rather, strategists on both sides intensified their search for ways out of the mutual destruction cage by trying to find more discriminating and thus supposedly more credible military uses for nuclear weapons. Opponents of a pure deterrence strategy, especially among the senior U.S. military leadership, argued that the only way to deter a nuclear war was to appear ready to fight one. Thus, as Kaplan notes, McNamara “talked Assured Destruction,” but “the actual targeting strategy” created by the U.S. military remained counterforce, and the Secretary’s attempts to use a doctrine of assured destruction as a means of “beating back the excessive demands of the military and [Joint Chiefs]” failed in the face of the Pentagon’s insistence on being able to fight a global nuclear war.29 (Two critics of this approach later sarcastically referred to these warfighting requirements as a strategy of “Nuclear Utilization Target Selection”—that is, “NUTS” as opposed to “MAD.”)30
This inherent tension between targeting and doctrine continues in U.S. nuclear strategy to the present day. Although America’s nuclear doctrine during the Cold War was termed “assured destruction,” its nuclear forces were designed and postured for both a counterforce war as well as retaliatory strikes. Military logic demanded that the most pressing targets for U.S. strategic forces should be the same type of enemy nuclear forces, followed by other military targets, energy and industrial infrastructure, and finally, population. This ordering of strikes was meant to communicate to the enemy that in the event of nuclear war, the United States would act like a rational military power and seek first and foremost to protect itself (while sparing innocent civilians as much as possible), and then proceed to strip the enemy of its ability to fight, its ability to govern, its ability to recover, and finally, its ability to exist at all. The paradox, of course, was that a readiness to proceed along so orderly a path of escalation also ran the risk of signaling that that the United States did not fear “assured” destruction and was willing to fight a nuclear conflict—thus theoretically giving the enemy an incentive to abandon further efforts at deterrence, and instead to strike first and hope for the best.
The advocates of MAD had the better argument about nuclear targeting, not only because of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, but because of the continual problem of “co-location,” meaning the proximity of military targets to nonmilitary areas. This is not a dilemma specific to nuclear war, of course: imprecise conventional bombers in World War II could not avoid devastating the areas around military targets placed in or near cities. Likewise, there was no way the nuclear counterforce scenario could really discriminate between military and civilian targets in any meaningful way—or at least not in a way that would allow the enemy to distinguish a limited strike from an all-out attack.
While there might be some hypothetical chance of limiting the use of nuclear arms on the battlefield, or even in the theater of war, those limits would almost certainly evaporate minutes into a strategic exchange. An attack meant only to cripple U.S. land-based missiles, for example, would require several hundred, if not thousands of warheads. Such a strike would be so large that the destruction would be indistinguishable from an attempt at national obliteration, especially in the midst of the kind of chaos which would surround a U.S. president in the few moments left for deliberation over how to respond. No matter what either side wanted or intended, the terrible imperative of MAD would quickly assert itself once such an exchange was under way
The search for a silver bullet that could solve this dilemma and allow a longer interval of nuclear warfighting (and thus ostensibly limit the conflict early) inevitably led both sides to think about missile defenses. By the mid-1960s, land- and sea-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) constituted the main Soviet and American deterrent forces, and once the superpowers could destroy each other in a matter of minutes, the urge to find a way out of that paralyzing reality was sure to follow. The idea of a national missile defense capable of destroying nuclear-armed, long-range ballistic missiles in flight was a natural extension of the Cold War arms race.31
The discussion about missile defenses in the 1960s was more important as a conceptual exercise rather than as practical effort. Missile defenses of any kind are complicated and difficult to construct even in the twenty-first century, but national defenses were virtually impossible in the era before the development of more advanced technologies. Supercomputers with only a fraction of the speed and computing power of a modern notebook or laptop computer cost millions of dollars each in the 1960s and 1970s. (Consider, for example, that the recently retired U.S. space shuttle at first carried less computing power aboard than people take for granted in their mobile phones today.) Moreover, “defenses” in the 1960s were not precise weapons that could cleanly eliminate incoming strikes and thus save large, soft targets such as cities. Rather, they were blunt instruments that relied on exploding nuclear weapons—some as large as five megatons—high in the atmosphere to wipe out the armada of warheads falling onto North America from space.
The Americans concluded early on that there was no way these systems could defend anything but the most hardened targets such as missile silos, and even those stood little chance of survival under most circumstances. But as Kaplan later observed, “once a few billion dollars are spent on any weapons program, the chance of stopping it from going into production is practically nil.”32 The Soviets, of course, had enough weapons to overwhelm any such defense easily, and could always build more. This early Cold War missile defense enterprise finally ended up resting on a half-hearted rationale based on stopping a putative (and at the time, nonexistent) Chinese ballistic threat. The idea was too seductive to abandon completely, but too impractical to defend with any semblance of technological seriousness. One of McNamara’s deputies casually asked him if he really wanted to make the case that the United States needed a defense against a future ICBM threat from Asia: “China bomb, Bob?” McNamara muttered in reply: “What else am I going to blame it on?”33 Eventually, the whole idea was shelved, at least for the time being.
American strategists in the late 1960s, under Lyndon Johnson and then President Richard Nixon, continued the quest to find political meaning in a strategic nuclear exchange even as they increasingly doubted whether such meaning existed. The Soviets, for their part, as disciples of both Clausewitz and Lenin, continued to insist, at least publicly, that even nuclear war would have a political character and that a meaningful victory was possible. This Soviet obstinacy was a challenge for the Americans, because a stable deterrent relationship requires that both sides have some sort of common understanding of the threat and of what each has at stake. The Americans hoped that an East-West agreement not to engage in mutual hemispheric suicide implied a more lasting foundation for cooperation and understanding between Moscow and Washington. The Soviets, however, had agreed to no such thing and were having none of it, choosing instead to regard the strategic nuclear standoff as a license to engage in various kinds of mischief so long as they avoided the risk of general war.34
MAD might have been an unarguable fact in terms of describing a strategic nuclear stalemate, but as a policy it was far more contentious. Supporters of an assured destruction doctrine would claim that all MAD was ever supposed to do was to prevent a global disaster, and that by the mid-1970s it was performing that task admirably. Critics countered that the concept had done little more than self-deter the United States from confronting an increasingly aggressive Soviet Union, and had done little to stop a dramatic expansion of Soviet power that the Kremlin itself extolled with considerable pride. For a growing number of these skeptics, MAD looked more like an unholy bargain than a guarantee of global peace.
The Countervailing Strategy and the Collapse of MAD
The 1970s were not kind to the United States. From the defeat in Vietnam to the economic shock of an oil embargo, the Americans and their NATO allies were reeling from a loss of confidence at a time when the USSR was surging in power and influence. America was retreating from its alliances and partnerships, while the Soviet presence around the world was growing rapidly. Worse, the Soviets made no pretense of caring what the United States or the hapless Europeans thought about anything. As former Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin described in his memoirs, the Soviet leadership would discuss their advances and plans in various regions without so much as a passing reference to the United States.35