Guardians of the Arsenal: the Politics of Nuclear Strategy. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 19, 1990 by Angelo M. Codevilla

Guardians of the Arsenal: The Politics of Nuclear Strategy

THIS BOOK faithfully reflects "the best thinking" of the liberal establishment about nuclear strategy and its place in American politics. It has three parts: a resume of the struggles from President Truman's time until 1980 over how to match U.S. nuclear weapons to Soviet targets; an account of how the SDI debate transcended those struggles, although only rhetorically; and a series of reflections on the role of "the professionals" who, the author claims, secretly kept policymaking on an even keel as public controversies raged. These parts are unified by a single thesis: There has been a contradiction between actual plans and policies, and the so-called "declaratory policy," which is what politicians have sad about nuclear strategy in order to keep public support. The author argues that because in recent years this dichotomy has both grown and become exposed, something must be done to bring words and deeds together. Despite some ambiguity, she clearly comes down on the side of "the professionals"--a/k/a bureaucrats.

It must be said that valuable lessons are here to be learned, although not necessarily those the author intended, and although they are buried in a poorly written, statistically inaccurate book. Instead of facts and figures the reader gers innumerable opinions by "experts," the juxtaposition of which forms the argument. There is no "ground truth" to which the reader can refer. Worse yet, Miss Nolan's language reflects the obscurantist rites of the liberal tribe: Meaningful anti-missile defense is impossible because of "the laws of physics." Which ones? How?

But what of the lessons? Liberals were never terribly proud of the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). During the middle and late McNamara years--1963 to 1968--when this view of things was becoming dogma in the defense establishment, it was treated as suitable only for private discussion among initiates. Only briefly in the aftermath of the SALT I and ABM treaties of 1972 did the establishment try to convince large audiences that perpetual mutual vulnerability was a hard-won conquest of skillful negotiators and weaponeers, and that, as John Newhouse put it, "killing weapons is bad, killing people is good." But Gerard Smith's and Henry Kissinger's speeches on the subject proved to be political liabilities, and by the late 1970s the establishment line had changed: mutual vulnerability was the ineluctable consequence of the invention of nuclear weapons, and American strategic planners had always done the best they could, within the narrow constraints of technology, to safeguard civilians.

Miss Nolan's book repeats this later theme, arguing, in effect, that the policy of MAD never really existed. It was just a rhetorical device by which McNamara made the point that the U.S. already had enough nuclear weapons. The book describes in some detail McNamara's counterforce policies of 1961 and 1962 (our weapons should be used primarily to defeat the Soviet Union's weapons), and then skips over most of McNamara's people-killing policies, asserting that counterforce was McNamara's true legacy. This is historical legerdemain worthy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Yet if the crucial strategic question of the 1960s really was, Should the United States acquire the equipment for destroying Soviet missiles in their silos? then McNamara's decisions about specific missiles and warheads added up to a firm no, because the Poseidon and the Minuteman III were not given the combination of nuclear yield and accuracy necessary for the job. And this was not due to any technological deficiency. Look at the Soviet Union. Soviet missiles--especially the SS-9--were initially less accurate than ours, but made up for that with truly huge yields. As Soviet accuracy went up, yields came down, but the combination of yield and accuracy produced a constant 90 per cent probability of killing a U.S. missile silo with one shot. The Soviet missile force today has some seven thousand warheads with that capacity. The U.S. force has exactly five hundred, while our most numerous weapon is of a very different sort. At McNamara's behest, the Poseidon was designed to carry up to 14 nuclear bomblets of forty kilotons with an accuracy of about one-third of a mile. Those who say MAD was never "really" U.S. policy must deal with the fact that although the Poseidon can be used for a variety of purposes, its optimal use is for spreading a twenty-pound-per-square-inch overpressure above urban areas. It is a city killer, whereas against a Soviet silo, the Poseidon stands about a 4 per cent chance of success.

But in terms of various hardware options, the book's (and the establishment's) worries are behind the times. It hardly matters any more how many counterforce warheads the U.S. has, since Soviet reserve missiles are rapidly moving onto roads and rails. It is another measure of the author's ignorance that she takes uncritically the Air Force assertion that manned bombers roaming Soviet territory are the answer to Soviet movile missiles. This is a sales pitch for the B-2 directed at unsophisticates. The Air Force itself does not take seriously the idea of stealth bombers (and non-existing stealth tankers) crisscrossing a defended Eurasian continent for days at a time, picking off missile-carrying trains and trucks.