The Cold War: A MILITARY History (17 page)

An additional hazard was the distinct danger that, if a real war had started, time would have been so short that one side or the other might well have escalated rapidly to the highest level in order not to be caught out by its opponent. This was in many ways a modern equivalent of the mobilization timetables which so influenced general staffs in 1914 and were so inflexible that the generals brought enormous pressure on their governments to call up the reserves and start the railways moving in order to complete national deployment before the prospective enemy could do so.

In addition to these weighty factors, there were many other issues which were new to war planning. For example, if side A’s aim was to force side B into negotiating, then it made little sense to destroy B’s political and military
leadership
, which was precisely the group required to conduct such negotiations. Also, while A might gain some short-term military advantages by destroying B’s communications systems, such destruction would only prevent B’s leadership from communicating with the attackers to negotiate a cessation of hostilities. A further factor was that the loss of communications would prevent B’s leadership from exercising control over its subordinates, giving rise to the possibility that the junior echelons might then act in a totally unpredictable and irrational manner. This could possibly escalate the war well beyond what A’s leadership had planned and force B into escalatory retaliation, to which A then felt it necessary to respond, and so on. Thus, while in virtually all previous wars, up to and including the Second World War, it had been a traditional aim to destroy the enemy’s capital city and communications systems, in a Third World War it might have proved more effective and symbolic to leave them alone, while destroying other cities.
^fn4

Another novel factor, of growing importance during the Cold War, was that in earlier eras it had been assumed that war and military matters in general were best left to the military, and that academics, if they insisted on meddling, should confine their attentions to military history. To be sure, an occasional civilian commentator might use either newspapers or books to publish his views, but defence matters were considered the province of admirals and generals, who in turn consigned the detail to the commanders and colonels. One of the significant innovations during the Cold War, however, was the increasing interest taken by sections of the academic community, particularly in matters of nuclear strategy, and an enormous volume of articles, theses and books appeared. Such academics, particularly in the United States, sometimes also achieved positions of great influence in the government.

One contradiction these academics could not escape was that if they had ‘inside’ official information it was invariably so highly classified that they could not use it, while if they did not have such information their arguments were unavoidably based on information available in the public sector, which was frequently out of date, incomplete or, in some cases, just wrong. To take just one example, in the mid-1950s various books were published based on the hypothesis that H-bombs could never be reduced in size sufficiently to fit on the front end of an ICBM, the authors being quite unaware that, even as they wrote, such ‘miniaturized’ warheads were actually under test.

A further problem facing the population at large was that public pronouncements by senior service officers (especially when appearing before congressional or parliamentary committees) were almost always gloomy. Their equipment, they claimed, was at best obsolescent, and the shining new
equipment
which had been introduced into service the previous year with such ceremony was now completely outclassed by something just introduced by the enemy; and, in any case, the manpower was insufficient. But they would always claim that, given more money, new equipment, greater resources and more men – and provided these were given to the admiral’s or general’s own service or branch of service – all would be solved.
^fn5

Indeed, there were frequently two quite different agendas, especially in the United States. On the one side there was the public rhetoric, which was frequently designed to meet political or even bureaucratic aims – e.g. congressional appropriations or the aims of national (sometimes even local) politics and even inter-service rivalries. On the other side were the real policy and the actual governmental plans for the employment of the nuclear arsenal in a real-world conflict.

A particular case was the concept of the triad, a term which originated in the US Department of Defense and which was used to describe – and justify – a threefold order of strategic forces, consisting of sea-based missiles, land-based missiles and bombers. In reality it was not so much a philosophical concept – although it certainly had a fine Hegelian ring to it
^fn6
– as an attempt to rationalize a situation which already existed and to continue to procure new systems to equip all three legs, such as bombers, which might not otherwise have been sustainable.

TYPES OF ATTACK

Various types of attack were envisaged.
First strike
(also known as a ‘pre-emptive strike’) was the most feared, in which one superpower would launch an attack on its opponent’s strategic weapons with no preliminary warning and no sign of a build-up. In such a case the target superpower might have received about thirty minutes’ warning of weapons being launched from the opponent’s home territory, although it was always possible that some weapons might be launched from closer in (e.g. by Soviet Yankee-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) patrolling off the US coast, or US Pershing missiles located in West Germany), when the warning would have been of the order of four minutes.

One of the possible responses to an incoming first strike was
launch-on-warning
,
in
which the victim launched its ICBMs in the minutes available between detecting the strike and its actual arrival. The main problem with this was that the aggressor would almost certainly have retained a reserve of ICBMs and it seemed unlikely that, in the time available, the victim would have been able to establish which silos the incoming missiles had been launched from and thus which silos remained occupied and so were worth attacking. It appeared logical, therefore, that a launch-on-warning aimed at enemy ICBM silos and thus hitting many empty silos would have been largely wasted and that such a strike would more profitably have been aimed at ‘other military targets’ (see below).

US strategists discussed a possible Soviet strategy known as ‘
pin down
’, which postulated that Soviet SLBMs might be launched from SSBNs close to the US coast to prevent a launch-on-warning by US ICBMs. It was at least theoretically possible that such SLBMs could have been aimed and timed in such a way that they exploded among the US ICBMs as they lifted off from their silos, thus either destroying the US missiles or seriously affecting their accuracy.

Another form of Soviet strike which caused concern to US planners was the development of the
Fractional Orbital Bombardment System
(FOBS), which involved launching a missile into a low (approximately 160 km) orbit and then, after less than one complete orbit, firing retrorockets to make the warhead descend rapidly and steeply on to the target. This would have greatly reduced the warning time and, because the missiles would have approached the continental USA from a hitherto unexpected direction (south-east), it forced the USA to build a new radar station at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The Soviets tested both SS-9 and SS-X-10 missiles in this role, but neither was ever deployed operationally.

At the lowest end of the strategic nuclear ladder was the use of a very small number of nuclear weapons in an
exemplary
(or
demonstrative
) attack, intended to show determination either to use nuclear weapons on a large scale, if pushed any further, or to attack certain types of target. Such an attack would have had to be either preceded or accompanied by a specific warning to make it clear to the other side what was intended, but there was an argument that such an attack would invite retaliation in kind, in which the other side would launch a similar number of warheads against similar types of target. Indeed, the other side might well have felt compelled to make a response-in-kind even if it intended to take matters no further.
^fn7
Thus the originator of an exemplary attack needed to expect similar losses and casualties to its opponent’s, which (at least in theory) would not have been
escalatory
. Contingency plans for such ‘demonstrations’ were included in NATO nuclear planning, and were certainly part of the Berlin plans.
^fn8

One step higher on the ladder of nuclear escalation was a
limited-objective attack
. Attacks on numerous types of target fell into this category, such as Soviet strikes against one or more US carrier groups, US strikes against Soviet naval surface-action groups, and strikes against bases such as Pearl Harbor or Plesetsk. The Soviet Union was considered more likely than the USA to undertake such strikes, although the USA needed to have the capability in case it was required for a response-in-kind. The conduct of such attacks would have required elaborate command-and-control facilities, and it could well have been very difficult for the victim to distinguish between tactical and strategic weapons (if, indeed, such a distinction retained any relevance once war had started).

Massive counter-military attacks
also covered a wide spectrum of possibilities, ranging from a strike at the opponent’s strategic offensive forces to an all-out attack on all military forces, logistics installations, military-oriented research establishments and military–industrial facilities. Targets for such an attack would have been selected from a list of some 10,000 such targets in the USSR and some 5,000–7,000 in the USA. Such an attack could not avoid collateral damage to urban centres and would, at least in theory, have been deterred by a city-attack capability.

Throughout the Cold War both sides intended to maintain a reserve of weapons as an
urban–industrial reserve
, which was to be used as a last resort, when all else had failed, against the enemy’s vitals. Thus US plans for a response-in-kind following a Soviet first strike against ICBM sites could only have been carried out using weapons which were not part of the urban–industrial reserve. There was a point, certainly in US planning in the 1970s, where targeting enemy cities simply in order to kill people changed to a more precise form of targeting in which specific military, economic and political targets were selected with the intention of inhibiting the enemy’s post-war recovery.

All US plans, and presumably the Soviets’ too, enabled the plan to be implemented with the exclusion of either a specific target or targets, or of a category of target. In US strategic jargon, these were known as ‘
withholds
’. Thus communications systems were withholds, in some US plans, while Moscow was a withhold in a US attack on major cities.
^fn9
The Reagan plans, however, specifically instructed that weapons were to be retained to attack such ‘withholds’, presumably on the semantic ground that if a target was omitted from a plan but no weapons were left to attack it, it was an ‘exclusion’ rather than a withhold.

Response-in-kind
was designed to attack the same character of target and to inflict casualties of the same order of magnitude as the attack being replied to. To be credible it had maintain the same character of engagement, although it was foreseen, at least in the USA, that it could be escalatory if force assymetries existed such that the opponent could not counter-escalate.
⁵

Nth-country reserve
was a concept in which a superpower retained a reserve of strategic weapons to deal with another country, apart from the opposing superpower. At the height of the Cold War this might have been China in the case of the USA, and France and the UK in the case of the USSR.

TYPES OF TARGET

The USA divided targets into three major categories: counter-force, counter-value, and other military targets.

Counter-force targets
were the enemy’s strategic nuclear forces, which comprised ICBM silos, bomber bases and SSBNs in harbour. The category also included political and military nuclear command-and-control centres, and their relevant communications systems. Such targets were given progressively greater protective ‘hardening’ as the Cold War progressed, and their destruction depended increasingly upon the power and accuracy of the warheads.

Counter-value targets
were cities and industrial complexes. In the late 1980s the USA had 162 cities with populations greater than 100,000, of which thirty-five exceeded 1 million inhabitants. In contrast, the USSR had 254 cities of over 100,000, of which only thirteen exceeded 1 million inhabitants. Western Europe had some exceptional concentrations, including eight areas with over 2.5 million inhabitants. For the USA and the USSR, cities were the targets for their SLBMs and the less accurate ICBMs.

Other military targets
covered a collection of low-collateral-damage, high-military-value targets, including barracks, nuclear storage sites, nuclear production facilities, and headquarters. According to US sources there were about 2,000–3,000 such targets in the USSR and approximately 1,000 in the USA, although Soviet target analysts could well have included more in the USA.

WARHEADS

In the original ballistic missiles, such as the German A-4 and its immediate derivatives, the warhead was an integral part of the missile. From the mid-1950s onwards, however, the warhead separated from the missile in space
and
descended on an independent, unpowered trajectory to the target; the missile itself thus became simply a means of transportation. Initially, such re-entry vehicles (RVs) contained one warhead each, but by the early 1960s US and Soviet strategic planners found themselves faced by many more targets than they had missiles. One possible solution was to build vast numbers of missiles, but this would have required an equal number of silos, plus the associated command-and-control facilities, and would have been extremely expensive.