Nuclear Strategy: Can There Be a Happy Ending?
Our policies for preventing nuclear war, mercifully, have never been tested to the point of failure. This cannot be said of our policies that have sought to reverse, or at least to halt, the expansion of nuclear arsenals threatening our annihilation. For more than two decades now, the United States, using both diplomacy and self-restraint, has tried--and failed--to halt the nuclear arms competition with the Soviet Union.
Fred Charles Iklé has been the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy since 1981. He was Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Nixon and Ford Administrations, 1973-76.
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For the Reagan Administration, 1983 was to be "the year of the missile." It was to be the moment of truth in the American effort to introduce new intermediate-range weapons into Western Europe and to "modernize" the U.S. strategic arsenal, primarily with the development of the MX intercontinental missile. Until this buildup in defenses was well under way, nuclear arms control would be a matter of keeping up appearances, of limiting damage, of buying time, and of laying the ground for possible agreement later.
It is a delicate matter to defend deterrence, the doctrine that it is the very lethality of nuclear weapons that lessens the likelihood of their use sufficiently to make us safe. That the consciousness of that lethality in the corridors of power in Washington and Moscow has played an important role in the keeping of the peace since the advent of the nuclear age is beyond doubting, as is the unwisdom of tampering with that consciousness, of accepting theories or technologies that will diminish the terror with which the prospect of nuclear war has been traditionally regarded and make nuclear weapons in any way less inhibiting to use. Still, if it is possible to underestimate the contribution that nuclear weapons make to the prevention of nuclear war, it is possible to overestimate it, too.
Negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union on nuclear arms control are at an impasse. Following the deployment in Europe of the first U.S. Pershing II and cruise missiles in the fall of 1983, the Soviet Union walked out of the negotiations on intermediate-range forces (INF) and refused to agree to a resumption date for the negotiations on strategic nuclear forces (START). Whether and under what conditions the negotiations will resume is uncertain.
