The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory PDF

2 The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory Andrew L. Ross Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. T HE HISTORY OF US NUCLEAR POLICY, STRATEGY, AND capabilities is the history of an intellectual struggle between the proponents of a punishment-based deterrent posture and the...

2 The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory Andrew L. Ross Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. T HE HISTORY OF US NUCLEAR POLICY, STRATEGY, AND capabilities is the history of an intellectual struggle between the proponents of a punishment-based deterrent posture and the proponents of a denial-based deterrent posture, or between a school of thought determined to achieve “total victory” in nuclear war, and a school of thought that feared “total defeat” in any nuclear conflagration.1 The latter amounts to “deterrence plus”; that is, deterrence plus nuclear warfighting capabilities, to include the capability to fight a limited nuclear war. That ability was thought by its advocates to enhance deterrence; deterrence requires the capability to fight, survive, and win along the entire spectrum of nuclear conflict, from limited to total. Of course, advocates of a punishment-centric posture charged that a limited nuclear war capability would serve to lower the nuclear threshold— the imprudent assumption that nuclear war could be kept limited (was it less prudent to presume that it could not be?) would make it more likely that nuclear weapons would be used—and thereby erode rather than enhance deterrence. The ascendance of a denial, warfighting emphasis, aided and abetted by the continuing development of a range of nuclear and delivery system technologies, 2 was evident in the increasing emphasis on flexibility, “nuclear options,” “limited-employment options,” and “limited nuclear options” (LNOs)—the selective employment of nuclear forces in ways other than the massive retaliation envisioned during the Eisenhower administration. 21 Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. 22 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War Concepts such as controlled, deliberate response, graduated deterrence, measured retaliation, (second-strike) counterforce, damage limitation, city avoidance, escalation management, escalation dominance (horizontal as well as vertical), active defense, and extended or protracted nuclear war were translated into Robert McNamara’s flexible response, James Schlesinger’s flexible or selective targeting, Harold Brown’s countervailing strategy (with its preprogrammed, selective, and limited options), and Caspar Weinberger’s emphasis on “prevailing.”3 Nuclear plenty provided a de facto assured destruction, punishment capability that remained an existential, background feature of the US posture even as declaratory policy and targeting plans alike came to emphasize denial capabilities. Limited nuclear war (and related) concepts and the postures into which they were translated from the 1960s through the 1980s represented an effort to escape from the dilemmas of assured destruction gone MAD (mutual assured destruction). The attempt to escape the existential reality and logic of MAD failed. Indeed, it could not but have failed. Rather ironically perhaps, the escape attempt backfired. MAD wasn’t escaped or even weakened; it was reinforced. In short, the (perverse?) logic of limited nuclear war, whether on the strategic level or theater level, served to 1) reduce the perceived risks of nuclear use (how bad could the use of just a few, small nuclear weapons be?), 2) increase its likelihood (if it won’t be so bad, why not use a few nuclear weapons?), and 3) lower the nuclear threshold (is there really that much of a difference between small nuclear weapons and advanced conventional weapons?). Limited nuclear war logic failed, however, to reduce/lower the risks or likelihood of escalation (what logic ensured that escalation would be controlled?).4 The ever-present possibility, if not inevitability, that limited nuclear use would escalate to general nuclear war (would it be prudent to assume that such escalation was not inevitable?) ineluctably brought us back to the punishmentbased logic of assured destruction. In the Cold War world of nuclear plenty, we were all MAD men (and women). The ethical dilemmas were profound; 5 the alternative, however, was worse. Today, a decade into the twenty-first century, the scenarios that include nuclear next use no longer feature two nuclear-rich superpowers. Instead, contemporary scenarios highlight new nuclear weapons states (NWS) with more limited capabilities than those of the Cold War superpowers, and nonstate actors with nuclear ambitions but, at present, nonexistent capabilities.6 Robert Kaplan, a member of the Defense Policy Board, recently advised that Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 23 “we must be more willing, not only to accept the prospect of limited war but... to accept the prospect of a limited nuclear war between states.”7 The specter of limited nuclear war has reappeared.8 That specter has been accompanied by a revival of interest in—indeed, a harkening back to—the original work on limited nuclear war and its relevance.9 We return, therefore, to the days of yesteryear. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. The Emergence of Limited Nuclear War “Theory” Once upon a time, during the second half of the often fondly remembered but not so halcyon 1950s, limited war, including limited nuclear war, was all the rage. Air Marshal Sir John Slessor declared that “as far ahead as we need trouble to look we must be able and willing, if necessary, to fight small wars—and fight them with the right weapons.”10 A not yet eminent Henry Kissinger asserted that “the most fruitful area for current strategic thought is the conduct and efficacy of limited nuclear war.”11 These shots, drawn from pieces that appeared in 1956, were fired as the debate on limited war and its nuclear variant was heating up. Bernard Brodie, whose early work so skillfully and influentially framed nuclear policy and strategy choices, tells us that the debate emerged in 1954.12 In his own piece that year, Brodie anticipated Kissinger’s assertion by two years: “It... seems plain that opportunities to apply nuclear weapons usefully are much more open ended in tactical than they are in strategic use.”13 Lawrence Freedman has pointed to Liddell Hart as the intellectual father of limited war theory.14 In 1946, as Brodie acknowledged,15 Liddell Hart’s call for limiting war, issued when the United States possessed a nuclear monopoly, foreshadowed the debate that was to emerge in the mid-1950s: “Warfare as we have known it in the last thirty years is not compatible with the atomic age.... Where both sides possess atomic power, ‘total warfare’ makes nonsense.... An unlimited war waged with atomic power would make worse than nonsense; it would be suicidal.... It is likely that any future warfare will be less unrestrained and more subject to mutually agreed rules.”16 The efforts of the US government to assess the role that nuclear weapons might play in limited war, as Halperin has noted, began in 1948.17 It was in the second half of the 1950s, however, that limited nuclear war thinking and the ensuing debate hit full force. Prompted, Brodie suggested, by the advent of the hydrogen bomb, a torrent of work, much of it by those Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. 24 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War who would later be recognized as charter members of the nuclear priesthood, appeared in prominent journals and books.18 In 1957 alone, both Henry Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy and Robert Osgood’s Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy made their appearance.19 The turn to limited nuclear war thinking raised fundamental questions about the role of nuclear weapons, deterrence, and stability that preoccupied several generations of national security and defense analysts and planners throughout the Cold War and the post–Cold War, but still nuclear, era. This debate revealed, and was itself an indication of, the extent to which thinking about the role of nuclear weapons, whether in international affairs generally or in US policy and strategy specifically, was far from settled. The debate emerged both against the backdrop of two episodes of majorpower total war during the first half of the twentieth century and in the immediate aftermath of a distasteful, inconclusive experience with limited war in Korea. The former was regarded as suicidal in the new atomic age; the latter both as an experience not to be repeated and as a precursor of what was to come. Much like the Korean War, the limited nuclear war debate was waged in the context of a long-haul, bipolar, Cold War struggle. Aided and abetted by NSC-68 (and the Korean War), a perhaps unavoidably militarized form of containment had emerged that remained in place for the duration. Despite the Korean War, Europe, which loomed large in the limited nuclear war debate, was the de facto central front of the Cold War. No longer did America shun permanent alliances; indeed, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was busy replicating NATO in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and entering into bilateral alliance relationships with the likes of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. An America that had sought to remain detached and distant, to shun foreign entanglements and military obligations, was increasingly attached and present around the world; it had become quite decidedly entangled and obligated. The emerging limited nuclear war debate was informed and shaped too by the loss of the US nuclear monopoly, which had been unexpectedly fleeting, as well as by continued US nuclear superiority, which was feared to be fleeting. Under the “New Look” that the Eisenhower administration brought to US defense policy, however, US nuclear superiority was to compensate for the presumed conventional superiority of the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc (and Asiatic) clients. Secretary Dulles, in a landmark January 1954 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), called for “placing more reliance on Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 25 deterrent power and less dependence on local defensive power.”20 He placed a premium, however, on achieving “a maximum deterrent at a bearable cost” (what was soon referred to as “more bang for the buck”). “Local defenses,” therefore, were to “be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power.” Dulles famously declared that the United States would “depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing.” Even though Dulles soon thereafter, in an April 1954 Foreign Affairs piece, acknowledged that “massive atomic and thermonuclear retaliation is not the kind of power which could most usefully be evoked under all circumstances,”21 his own words had, to many, conveyed precisely that message. The perception stuck. Massive retaliation’s consequent perceived lack of credibility, particularly under conditions of nuclear plenty, fueled the turn to limited war and the role of nuclear weapons in limited war. In a piece that appeared the same month as Dulles’s CFR speech, Brodie trenchantly anticipated the soon to be voiced objections to massive retaliation: Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. The one thing which we must obviously begin to face up to in both our military and political planning is the fact that strategic bombing, in which we seem to have pretensions to monopoly privilege, is probably already a two-way capability.... National objectives in war cannot be consonant with national suicide. But for the future there is no use talking about an unrestricted mutual exchange of nuclear weapons as involving anything other than national suicide for both sides.22 Brodie was quite explicit in a subsequent piece: “At a time when the opponent will be able to do to our cities and countryside whatever we might threaten to do to his, the whole concept of ‘massive retaliation’... will have to be openly recognized as obsolete.”23 The response to Dulles’s massive retaliation concept was provided by Brodie in a short piece that appeared in November 1954 that encapsulated much of the emerging analytical zeitgeist. For Brodie, recognition of the absurdity of total war in the nuclear age was critical: “When we are talking about an unrestricted general war we are talking about a catastrophe to which there are no predictable limits.” Therefore, “the threat of unlimited war” can be used “to deter only the most outrageous kind of aggression” since “the penalties for the use of total force have become too horrible.” Brodie wrote, “our present-day diplomacy based on the deterrent value of our great atomic power is in danger of being strait-jacketed by fear of the very power we hold.” He acknowledged Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. 26 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War that massive retaliation “indisputably remains the only answer to a direct massive assault.” Limited aggression, however, required a more limited response: “If total war is to be averted, we must be ready to fight limited wars with limited objectives—if for no other reason than that limited objectives are always better than unlimited disaster.”24 Brodie’s fear that the US nuclear deterrent would be strait-jacketed was soon echoed by Kissinger, who feared that the disproportionate risks posed by massive retaliation would paralyze the United States.25 For him, “limited war represents the only means for preventing the Soviet bloc, at an acceptable cost, from overrunning the peripheral areas of Eurasia.”26 Liddell Hart piled on: “Would any responsible government, when it came to the point, dare to use the H-bomb as an answer to local and limited aggression?... To the extent that the H-bomb reduces the likelihood of full-scale war, it increases the possibilities of limited war pursued by widespread local aggression:... the value of strategic bombing forces has largely disappeared—except as a last resort.”27 And Slessor, while approvingly acknowledging Dulles’s attempt to clarify his thoughts about massive retaliation, asserted that there is “no alternative to meeting limited aggression with limited force.”28 It was in this context that the limited nuclear war debate emerged full force. Responses to massive retaliation voiced by the likes of Brodie, Kissinger, Liddell Hart, and Slessor prompted a critical counterstrike. The extensive literature that was generated served to reveal the considerable analytical ferment that surrounded thinking about limited war and the role of nuclear weapons in limited war. Curiously, despite the eventual reconsiderations issued by some of limited nuclear war’s leading lights, it is a body of work that some have sought to resurrect, if somewhat selectively and misguidedly, of late. How we might most profitably frame this work was suggested in an insightful passage by Colin Gray: “The most influential of the limited nuclear war studies was Henry Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), while the most perceptive was Robert Osgood’s Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (1957).”29 Osgood’s book is not only worth revisiting, it provides a framework upon which to hang other work (including Kissinger’s) on limited war, whether conventional or nuclear, for or against. Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 27 Osgood on Limited War and Limited Nuclear War Given the context of two world wars, a Cold War, and, critically, the rise of nuclear weapons, for Osgood the logic of a turn to limited war was inescapable and unassailable: The principal justification of limited war lies in the fact that it maximizes the opportunities for the effective use of military force as a rational instrument of national policy.... Limited war would be equally desirable if nuclear weapons had never been invented. However, the existence of these and other weapons of mass destruction clearly adds great urgency to limitation.... The stupendous destruction accompanying all-out nuclear war makes it hard to conceive of such a war serving any rational purpose.... Only by carefully limiting the dimensions of warfare can nations minimize the risk of war becoming an intolerable disaster.30 Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. For Osgood and others, interest in avoiding a nuclear world war loomed large.31 Brodie had juxtaposed limited war with “unlimited disaster.”32 Kissinger too highlighted the unacceptability of total war: “Never before have the consequences of all-out war been so unambiguous, never before have the gains seemed so incommensurable with the sacrifices.”33 Brodie emphasized that the contemporary effort to limit war represented something quite new. For him, limited war connotes a deliberate hobbling of a tremendous power... for the sake only of inducing the enemy to hobble himself to a like degree. No problem like this one has ever presented itself before. The problem of modern limited war is the problem of sanctions for keeping out of action... precisely those instruments which from a strictly military point of view are the most efficient.34 In the nuclear age, particularly under the emerging if not yet extant condition of nuclear plenty, the potentially catastrophic consequences of unlimited, total war dictated the development of limited war strategy and capabilities. “As long as the necessary international political conditions for the limitation of armaments do not exist,” Osgood wrote, “the best assurance that armaments will not destroy civilization lies in the limitation of their use.”35 The recognition that the nuclear revolution had upset long-standing, traditional calculations about the ends and means of war was central to the case for limited war. That case rested in no small part on a dual reality—the Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. 28 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War impossibility of total victory and the possibility of total defeat—and represented, as well, an attempt to escape the dilemma inherent in that reality. In the nuclear age, pursuit of total victory could well result not in victory but in annihilation. This new, dual reality, particularly when paired with what was regarded as war’s inevitability, counseled, indeed dictated, an unfamiliar moderation and restraint in war. Objectives and means alike must be limited. Unconditional surrender could no longer be demanded of major power adversaries. In a nuclear world, total war, if not war generally, among major powers had become absurd. The logic of the turn to limited war was also informed by the fear that an unmatched Soviet ability to exploit the limited use of force would leave the United States in an untenable position. Osgood highlighted this fear early on in his call to (limited) arms: Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. If the United States is unwilling to take the risk of total war under certain circumstances, the Communists are likely to discover it. If the United States is incapable of effective limited resistance, the Communists will probably know it.... The Communist threat of limited aggression, coupled with the inability of the United States to contain limited aggression by limited means, will act as a powerful form of blackmail, which will tend to dissolve the political bonds of the free world and prepare the way for bloodless conquests.36 For Osgood and others, the Greek Civil War, Berlin Blockade, Korean War, and Indochina War (later known as the Vietnam War) indicated that the post–World War II years were a period of limited war.37 Osgood argued that “the world is ripe for unlimited war.... We cannot say that unlimited war is inevitable or that we may not actually be on the threshold of a new era of limited war.”38 The United States could ill afford to be nuclear-bound in an era of limited war that, ironically, had been ushered in by the nuclear revolution. America, Osgood urged, had to be prepared “to fight the kinds of wars most likely to occur.”39 That required “a diversified military capacity, capable of countering Communist aggression under a variety of contingencies”40 —the capability to fight and win not only at the upper (nuclear) end of the spectrum of conflict but along the entire spectrum and across all of its dimensions (conventional as well as nuclear). Kissinger advised that “as long as we are confronted by an opponent capable of initiating nuclear war against us, we require a continuous spectrum of nuclear and nonnuclear capabilities.”41 In his view, “a strategy of limited war... would use our retaliatory Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 29 power as a means to permit us to fight local actions on our own terms and to shift to the other side the risk of initiating all-out war.”42 The call for limited war capabilities, including limited nuclear war capabilities (later “limited nuclear options”), thus developed in tandem with the call for enhancing US and NATO conventional capabilities. The nuclear shadow loomed large over the limited war enterprise. An emerging, and inevitable, nuclear stalemate (aka “balance of terror”), Osgood noted, yielded “a calculus of risks that leads the nuclear powers from rationally and intentionally precipitating total war.”43 The realization, shared by the United States and the Soviet Union, that the unlimited use of nuclear weapons would result in “such terrible devastation as to outweigh any conceivable advantages”44 led Osgood to an ineluctable, and seemingly prudent, conclusion: “If we act on the assumption that a continuing limitation of war is possible, then there is some hope that war will remain limited; but if we act on the assumption that total war is either impossible or inevitable, then we shall forfeit this hope.”45 For Osgood and his fellow travelers, limited war, including limited nuclear war, was the solution to the dilemma of the nuclear age, a dilemma captured, variously, as “all or nothing,” “holocaust or humiliation,” “suicide or surrender,” or “sudden destruction or slow defeat.” Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. Defining, and Parsing, “Limited” But just what is a “limited war”? In a nuclear age, what’s so limited about limited war, particularly limited nuclear war? Limited war, obviously, was something less than unlimited war. In an age when unlimited war promised total destruction, did limited war promise merely less than total destruction? If unlimited war was to be equated with unlimited disaster, was limited war merely limited disaster? Given the exponential increase in firepower that nuclear weapons bring to bear, might limited nuclear war prove to be the equivalent of unlimited conventional war? To his credit, Osgood did not shrink from the task of specifying the meaning of “limited.” Beginning on the very first page of the book, he sought to help his readers understand what was meant by “limited war”: A limited war is one in which belligerents restrict the purposes for which they fight to concrete, well-defined objectives that do not demand the utmost military effort of which the belligerents are capable and that can be Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. 30 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War accommodated in a negotiated settlement. Generally speaking, a limited war actively involves only two (or very few) major belligerents in the fighting. The battle is confined to a local geographical area and directed against selected targets.... It demands of participants only a fractional commitment of their human and physical resources. It permits their economic, social, and political patterns of existence to continue without serious disruption.46 What is limited about limited war would seem readily apparent: Objectives sought (or not sought) Number of belligerents Geographical scope Temporal scope Means employed (or not employed) Target set Extent of disruption: —Economic —Social —Political Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. Having, seemingly, delimited the meaning of limited war, Osgood immediately muddied the waters: Limited war, however, is not a uniform phenomenon. Such a war can be limited in different ways; it can be limited in some respects and not in others.... A war can be limited in geographical scope but virtually unlimited in the weapons employed and the targets involved within the area of combat.... A war can range over an extensive geographical area and involve a large number of belligerents and yet... remain limited in the scale of its battles.... A war may be limited from the perspective of one belligerent, yet virtually unlimited in the eyes of another.47 The perhaps inevitable definitional flailing about included an attempt to define limited war by what it was not—unlimited war: An unlimited war is fought with every means available in order to achieve ends that are without objective limits or that are limited only by the capacity of the belligerents to destroy the enemy’s ability to resist. In unlimited war the belligerents either fight for no well-defined objectives at all, other than the Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 31 Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. destruction of the enemy, or else fight for objectives which threaten values so important as to be beyond compromise and which, therefore, compel the belligerents to exert their utmost military capacity toward breaking the enemy’s will and securing an unconditional surrender.48 Osgood reserved “total war” for “that distinct twentieth century species of unlimited war in which all the human and material resources of the belligerents are mobilized and employed against the total national life of the enemy.”49 The distinction between unlimited and limited war, Osgood conceded, was “partly a matter of degree.” He insisted, however, that in practice the distinction was clear (or at least “clear enough”).50 His examples of wars that featured “extreme means and extreme ends” included the annihilation of Carthage by Rome, Europe’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious wars, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and World War I and II.51 The distinctions drawn between unlimited and limited war would seem to lead to the conclusion that, at bottom, limited wars entail limited objectives and means. Osgood, however, asserted that there was one distinguishing characteristic of limited war: limited objectives.52 As long as objectives remain suitably limited, therefore, limited (nuclear) wars could involve a small number of adversaries—or not. Such wars could be geographically and temporally constrained—or not. The means employed could be limited—or not. The number of nuclear weapons employed could be limited—or not. The nuclear weapons employed could be limited to nonstrategic weapons—or not. The number of strategic nuclear weapons employed could be limited—or not. The target set could be constrained—or not. The extent of social, economic, and political disruption could be limited—or not. Kissinger too grappled with the difficulties inherent in defining limited war. As did Osgood, he rejected conceptualizations based on military distinctions: There exists no way to define a limited war in purely military terms. On the contrary, wars can be limited only by political decisions, by defining objectives which do not threaten the survival of the enemy. Thus an all-out war is a war to render the enemy defenseless. A limited war is one for a specific objective which by its very existence will establish a certain commensurability between the force employed and the goal to be attained.53 Aside from the not altogether mundane objection that what might be limited for one belligerent might be unlimited for another, highlighting limited Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. 32 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War objectives as the distinguishing characteristic of limited war raised the disturbing and seemingly illogical possibility that unlimited means could legitimately be employed for limited objectives. That feature of the definitions advanced by Osgood and Kissinger opened the door to the employment of nuclear weapons in limited war—and to the no less dangerous notion of limited nuclear war. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. Limited War Strategy Work on limited war strategy built upon the conceptual foundation laid by Osgood and his fellow travelers. That work was highly contextual. The balance of terror, whether delicate or not, between two scorpions in a bottle focused minds powerfully.54 Containment was thought to require both total war and limited war capabilities. The two were viewed as symbiotic. As Osgood put it, “The capacity to wage one kind of war is insufficient without the capacity to wage the other.”55 He pointed to three central objectives served by total war capabilities: deterrence of “major aggression” against “areas essential to our security”; deterrence of actions “incompatible with limited war”; and the ability to “fight a large-scale war.”56 The ability to deter, fight, and win total wars required the ability to deter, fight, and win limited wars. As Osgood put it: “The chief function of our capacity for total war will be to keep war limited and to strengthen our diplomacy against the blackmail that a strong and unscrupulous power can wield. However, the fulfillment of this function will not be sufficient for the purposes of containment unless it is accompanied by a ready capacity to resist lesser aggressions by limited war.”57 Limited wars were not to be considered lesser-included cases. The ability to deter, fight, and win in the least likely contingencies—total wars—did not necessarily ensure the ability to deter, fight, and win in the most likely contingencies—limited wars. Success in limited conflicts required capabilities tailored to those conflicts; those capabilities were not merely a subset of the capabilities needed for total war. Required was not only strategic nuclear offensive and defensive parity but local conventional ground force superiority. A local superiority that provided the ability “to occupy and control territory,” rather than simply obliterate it, was deemed to provide “a substantial advantage” in the event of total war.58 Kissinger pointed to “the importance of creating distinct forces for both allout and limited wars.”59 Not only, therefore, were the capabilities required Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 33 for the successful prosecution of the most likely but lower-risk contingencies known as limited war not included among those required for the less likely but higher-risk contingencies known as total war, they were regarded as critical to the achievement of success in the later as well as in the former. “Preparation for limited war,” Osgood argued, “is as vital to American security as preparation for total war.”60 Limited war required that ends and means be balanced: limited ends would be matched by limited means. Challenges to the political status quo were to be foresworn: “The specific political objectives for which the United States must be prepared to fight limited wars will not entail radical changes in the status quo.”61 Osgood’s emphasis on the need to limit political objectives was echoed by William Kaufmann: “Limited war cannot be a means of bringing about a radical alteration in the distribution of power; that would be a contradiction in terms.”62 Limits on the scale of war—area, weapons, targets, manpower, number of belligerents, duration, intensity—were to be observed. The key operational limits were those on geographical scope, weapons, and targets. Wars were to be kept local. To the extent possible, multiple, simultaneous local wars were to be avoided. Flexible weapons systems, strategies, and tactics “capable of supporting limited objectives under a wide variety of conditions” were considered ideal.63 Kissinger called for systems that were “flexible and discriminating” and units that were highly mobile and possessed substantial firepower.64 Also desirable were capabilities that facilitated a clear distinction between strategic and tactical means and targets, such as ground forces able to respond to aggression locally. For Osgood, the greatest challenge was to adapt nuclear weapons to limited war requirements. Tactical nuclear weapons, he argued, “carry greater promise than any other weapon of enabling us to fight limited wars on an equal basis against numerically superior forces.”65 Further, “tactical nuclear weapons, especially the low-yield battlefield weapons, can play a decisive role in supporting containment by giving the United States an adequate capacity for limited war at a tolerable cost.”66 Kissinger declared that “limited nuclear war represents our most effective strategy against nuclear powers or against a major power which is capable of substituting manpower for technology.”67 “The introduction of nuclear weapons on the battlefield,” Kissinger promised, “will shake the very basis of Soviet tactical doctrine.”68 Edward Teller cited claims that “small nuclear weapons will neutralize the Russian advantages Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. 34 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War of central location, massive conventional manpower, and surprise. The great power and mobility of the new weapons can also be used to regain an equal chance in a limited conflict.”69 Osgood cautioned against equating nuclear weapons and total war and conventional weapons and limited war; nuclear weapons are not necessarily incompatible with limited war. After all, the difference between multimegaton nuclear blockbusters and low-yield kiloton weapons is greater than that between conventional blockbusters and artillery shells.70 Indeed, “the special technological requirements of limited war are particularly marked in the realm of mobile, airborne troops capable of employing low-yield nuclear weapons and the most advanced conventional weapons with precision against military targets.”71 Nuclear weapons’ force multiplier effects were emphasized, but the limits of their military efficacy were recognized. They were not to be regarded as a panacea for limited war’s challenges. While tactical nuclear weapons would “provide a given number of troops with more firepower than conventional weapons,”72 they were not expected to reduce troop requirements. Nor were they expected to reduce defense expenditures.73 Nuclear weapons, whether tactical or otherwise, had no utility in irregular warfare. Nuclear use, even if merely of tactical nuclear weapons, that resulted in a response in kind would not necessarily be advantageous. Hiroshima- and Nagasaki-sized weapons would have to be used selectively if a conflict were to remain limited. If a conflict were to remain limited, horizontal and vertical nuclear escalation alike posed risks, as described by Kerry Kartchner and Michael Gerson in Chapter 7 of this volume. Osgood explicitly pointed to the need to avoid both sets of risks: The possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons in a manner proportionate to limited objectives would seem to depend largely upon the feasibility of two methods of limitation: (a) confining the use of these weapons to a limited geographical area and (b) using them with precision against military targets without destroying strategic targets and the large centers of population.74 Paul Nitze too underlined the need to observe geographical and targeting constraints: It is to the West’s interest, if atomic war becomes unavoidable, that atomic weapons of the smallest sizes be used in the smallest area, and against the most restricted target systems possible, while still achieving for the West the Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 35 particular objective which is at issue.... It is to the interest of the West that the means employed in warfare and the area of engagement be restricted to the minimum level which still permits us to achieve our objectives.75 Neither horizontal nor vertical escalation was acceptable. Either could blow the lid off of a limited conflict. In his discussion of the meaning of limited war, Bernard Brodie highlighted the need for deliberate restraint: “One basic restraint always has to be present if the term ‘limited war’ is to have any meaning at all: strategic bombing of cities with nuclear weapons must be avoided.”76 For Brodie, limited war required that any strategic bombing be avoided.77 Osgood emphasized both the necessity and feasibility of distinguishing between tactical and strategic uses of nuclear weapons. The necessity of the distinction must be conceded; a limited war would not long remain so in the face of the strategic employment of nuclear weaponry. Osgood maintained that, Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. theoretically, the distinction is feasible on three major conditions: (a) if tactical targets can be distinguished logically and physically from strategic targets in a manner that both belligerents recognize as legitimate; (b) if nuclear weapons can be used with sufficient precision to destroy specific tactical targets and those targets only; (c) if the belligerents are willing to tolerate strikes upon occasional strategic targets as accidental or incidental to attacks upon legitimate tactical targets.78 While theoretically feasible, in reality Osgood’s conditions seem rather fragile. The distinction between tactical and strategic, whether regarded as legitimate or not, could not but be highly context dependent. Osgood argued that “there is a good prospect that the condition of precision could be met by the smaller bombs and missiles and by further development of low-yield artillery weapons of from two to ten kilotons’ power, designed for use against enemy troops on the battlefield.”79 However, any use of nuclear weapons could well have been, and now likely would be, regarded as strategic. And how in the fog of war could an adversary be confident that the occasional strike on a strategic target was accidental or incidental rather than intended? Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. 36 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. The Challenge of Achieving Mutual Restraint Osgood was not unaware of the fragility of the conditions upon which the maintenance of a viable distinction between tactical and strategic rested. But the manner in which he sought to shore up those conditions should not have inspired confidence. Essentially, a belligerent was expected to demonstrate limited intentions by limiting the destruction wrought in the belief that other belligerents would reciprocate. In his own words: “The limitation of war may depend upon the ability of each belligerent to establish in the mind of the others a presumption that it is conducting the war according to definite and practicable restraints that are contingent upon the adversary doing likewise.”80 While acknowledging that “the distinction between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons may be nebulous in military terms,” Kissinger insisted that “every state has a powerful incentive to make some distinction, however tenuous its logic.” For him, the fear of the consequences of an all-out nuclear war “should be utilized to guarantee the ‘limits’ of war and diplomacy.”81 For both Osgood and Kissinger, a declaratory policy of “graduated deterrence” built on the distinction between strategic and tactical was expected to enhance the likelihood that mutual restraint would be maintained.82 Underlying the willingness, even seeming eagerness, to integrate nuclear weapons into the strategy for fighting a limited war is the assumption that nuclear and conventional weapons are not significantly different. That assumption, of course, flew in the face of a deeply engrained impression that the nuclear revolution had introduced a capability that was indeed profoundly different; the hydrogen bomb only served to strengthen that impression. Yet, Osgood asserted, “there are no rational grounds for regarding lowyield atomic battlefield weapons as any more horrible and inhumane than napalm or, for that matter, TNT.”83 Henry Kissinger, declared that “it is far from certain that a conventional war... would produce less devastation than a nuclear war, and in certain circumstances it may produce more.”84 Kissinger proclaimed as well that “we cannot afford even the implication that nuclear weapons are in a special category, apart from modern weapons in general, for this undermines the psychological basis of the most effective United States strategy.”85 Osgood further argued that “in considering the role of tactical nuclear weapons in a strategy of limited war, we must reckon with the fact that before long the Communists will also acquire an arsenal of these weapons. Their achievement will probably mark the time when nuclear weapons will Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 37 be considered conventional.”86 We see here, then, a relatively early instance of what has been referred to as the conventionalization, or mainstreaming, of nuclear weapons. In the future, according to Osgood, nuclear as well as conventional weapons would be used by nuclear-capable major powers.87 Wars in which only conventional weapons would be employed were increasingly unlikely. For some, that recognition provided a great incentive to avoid wars between, or among, nuclear-capable powers. For Kissinger and Osgood, it meant that the use of not only conventional weapons but nuclear weapons must be incorporated into operational planning.88 As we have seen, Osgood recognized that the use of Hiroshima- and Nagasaki-sized weapons must remain quite selective if a conflict were to remain limited. He was relatively sanguine, however, about the prospects for keeping nuclear escalation in check. While acknowledging the risk of miscalculation, escalation from tactical to strategic use, he argued, should not be regarded as inevitable: “It would be a great mistake to assume that the use of tactical nuclear weapons must necessarily lead to the use of strategic city-busters and total war; it might actually provide the best chance of keeping warfare limited when a power would otherwise have to choose between defeat and strategic retaliation.”89 Air Marshal Sir John Slessor assured a worried world that the risk of nuclear escalation was “diminishing every day.”90 Kissinger advised that we not “be defeatist about the possibility of limiting nuclear war.”91 Indeed, Kissinger asserted, “there is no inevitable progression from limited nuclear war to all-out thermonuclear war.”92 Teller shared his “belief that limited nuclear war can very well stay limited. In fact, during the course of such a war danger of an all-out war will be at a minimum.”93 The postulated lack of inevitability depended on the continued ability, in the midst of hostilities that had gone nuclear, of the parties concerned to differentiate between tactical and strategic targets—between battlefield targets and population and industrial centers, for instance—and intentions. Other analysts were far less sanguine.94 Bernard Brodie, for instance, noted that “the problems involved in the tactical use of atomic weapons seem to have peculiarly forbidding difficulties.... We tend in the end to get the same result in considering unrestricted tactical war in the future that we get in unrestricted strategic war. In each case the conclusion tends toward the nihilistic.”95 In a subsequent piece Brodie noted that “the use of any kind of nuclear weapon greatly increases the difficulties in the way of maintaining limitations.... It is much easier... to distinguish between use and non-use Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. 38 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War of nuclear weapons than between the use of, say, a 10-kiloton atomic weapon and a weapon two or three times as large.”96 James King too cast doubt on the escalation optimism voiced by Osgood: Once nuclear power is committed, it probably cannot be effectively stalemated short of total war.... This... is the major shortcoming of nuclear limits—that they are neither identifiable nor stable. In actual nuclear conflict... military incentive lies with the side that is the more willing to run the risk of total nuclear war, while the tenuousness of the limits makes the risk of total war very nearly incalculable.97 Liddell Hart objected that “once any kind of nuclear weapon is actually used, it could all too easily spread by rapid degrees, and lead to all-out war.”98 Kaufmann proffered the rather practical objection that “since the Russians are now approaching parity with us in nuclear stockpiles... and in delivery systems, it would seen desirable to consider foregoing the use of atomic weapons for tactical purposes, so long as one of the objects of policy is to keep a conflict limited.”99 George Ball’s assessment of the controllability of escalation, while written in the context of decisions about escalation in that limited war known as the Vietnam War, is very much on point here: Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. It is the nature of escalation that each move passes the option to the other side, while at the same time the party which seems to be losing will be tempted to keep raising the ante. To the extent that the response to a move can be controlled, that move is probably ineffective. If the move is effective, it may not be possible to control—or accurately anticipate—the response.... Once on the tiger’s back we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.100 Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, appeals to “evidence” at the time (or today) are to little avail.101 There is no evidence. Atomic bombs have been employed but twice. In both instances they were employed by a fledgling nuclear power with no stockpile to speak of against a non-nuclear state. Neither party was capable of nuclear escalation. Michael Howard put it well in his defense of Brodie’s emphasis on deterrence against Colin Gray’s call for a theory of nuclear victory, an unapologetic call for nuclear warfighting, when he wrote that “this is all guesswork. But what is absolutely clear is that to engage in nuclear war, to attempt to use strategic nuclear weapons for ‘warfighting’ would be to enter the realm of the unknown and the unknowable, and what little we do know about it is appalling.”102 Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 39 Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. Assessment In his classic Strategy in the Missile Age, which first appeared in 1959, Bernard Brodie wrote: “The conclusion that nuclear weapons must be used in limited wars has been reached by too many people, too quickly, on the basis of too little analysis of the problem.”103 Morton Halperin’s perceptive review of the limited nuclear war literature concluded on a trenchant note: “The instances in which the United States should introduce nuclear weapons in a limited war are likely to be rare, and the burden of proof should rest squarely on those advocating such first use.”104 There is little reason today to question the conclusions reached by Brodie and Halperin. Indeed, two of the foremost champions of limited nuclear war soon came to recognize the error of their ways. In the face of penetrating, even damning, assessments such as those advanced by Brodie and Halperin, Kissinger, uncharacteristically, backpedaled. Recognizing (finally?) the obvious, Kissinger conceded, first, to “doubts as to whether we would know how to limit nuclear war”: “While it is feasible to design a theoretical model for limited nuclear war, the fact remains that fifteen years after the beginning of the nuclear age no such model has ever achieved general agreement. It would be next to impossible to obtain from our military establishment a coherent description of what is understood by ‘limited nuclear war.’”105 Noting that the lack of experience with tactical nuclear weapons posed the not inconsiderable possibility of miscalculation—“both sides would be operating in the dark”— Kissinger acknowledged as well that “a nuclear war will be more difficult to limit than a conventional one.”106 Also acknowledged was a point that had been emphasized by Brodie: “The dividing line between conventional and nuclear weapons is more familiar and therefore easier to maintain... than any distinction within the spectrum of nuclear weapons.”107 Kissinger conceded that Soviet nuclear plenty had undermined his previous calculus of the cost and benefits of limited nuclear use. Rightly or wrongly, nuclear superiority had heightened confidence in the feasibility of limited nuclear war; parity not inconsiderably eroded that confidence. Third, it was conceded that arms control had yielded a new framework: “Nuclear weapons have been placed in a separate category and stigmatized as weapons of mass destruction without any distinction as to type or device.”108 Consequently, Kissinger now advised, “the conventional capability of the free world should be of such a size that a nuclear defense becomes the last and not the only recourse.”109 Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. 40 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War Osgood too backed off his previous insistence on the importance of adapting nuclear weapons to limited war requirements. In a reappraisal that appeared in 1969, Osgood stood his ground on limited war but admitted that ideas about limited nuclear war had “died from indifference and incredulity.”110 Subsequently, in both of two pieces that appeared in 1979, Osgood wrote of waning confidence in tactical nuclear warfare and raised questions about the utility of limited nuclear, or strategic, war options.111 The implications of Soviet nuclear plenty for the credibility of US limited nuclear war options had become quite evident: “The utility of limited strategic war as a means of controlling the process of escalation following the resort to nuclear weapons is undermined... by the growing Soviet counterforce capability.”112 The literature on limited war and limited nuclear war is riddled with ambiguity and imprecision. Even the term “limited war” is ambiguous. It was defined as much in terms of what it is not—unlimited, or total, war—as what it is. Where is the line between limited war and unlimited war, between limited nuclear war and unlimited nuclear war? The linkage of limited ends and means is helpful, indeed meaningful, but has its limits. As John Garnett has suggested, linking ends and means “raises questions about the relationship between the two. Do we fight with limited means because we have limited objectives, or do we settle for limited objectives because we are determined to fight with only limited means?”113 In the nuclear age, is it not the potentially catastrophic consequences of employing particular means that has led to the embrace of limited objectives? As Brodie correctly noted, “The restraint necessary to keep wars limited is primarily a restraint on ends, not means.... We want to keep war limited simply because total war as it would be fought today and in the future against a well-armed enemy is simply too unthinkable, too irrational to be borne.”114 Contrary to the assertions of Kissinger and Osgood, it is the necessity of employing limited means that dictates the pursuit of limited ends, not limited objectives that dictate the employment of limited means.115 In the aftermath of the nuclear revolution, particularly following the advent of the hydrogen bomb, it would not have been unreasonable to equate limited war with conventional war. Centuries of experience, however, with non-nuclear warfare, including the world wars of the first half of the twentieth century, had demonstrated mankind’s ability to wage total war with what during the nuclear era were regarded as the relatively limited capabilities of conventional weapons. But champions of the limited nuclear war enterprise Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 41 Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. failed to acknowledge that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had dramatically demonstrated that even the limited use of nuclear weapons could be the equivalent of unlimited conventional war. Nor was it clear, as Freedman has pointed out, how tactical nuclear weapons were to be employed.116 Were they merely the nuclear equivalent of conventional weapons, to be used offensively or defensively? Or were they to provide battlefield nuclear deterrence, whether based on punishment or denial? The distinction between “tactical” and “strategic,” which was central to the limited nuclear war enterprise, was notoriously imprecise. Champions of the limited nuclear war enterprise failed to specify the location of the dividing line between the two. Battlefield use of tactical nuclear weapons could perhaps qualify as purely tactical. But limited nuclear war need not be confined to a battlefield. Limited nuclear strikes against other than clearly battlefield targets, such as those located in the rear, on the territory of an ally, or, particularly, in the homeland of an opponent, could well be regarded as strategic, even if restricted to warfighting, or counterforce, targets. In addition, the employment of tactical nuclear weapons could be regarded as the onset of a strategic attack. And “collateral damage” resulting from the use of tactical weapons could be considered strategic. Similarly, the equation of tactical with counterforce and strategic with countervalue was off target. Counterforce strikes need not be limited to the battlefield and limited counterforce strikes (on an ICBM field, for instance) outside of the battlespace could reasonably be regarded as strategic. Any counterforce strike, no matter how limited, on targets within the homeland of an opponent would be regarded as strategic. Conclusion Much, of course, has changed since the development of limited war and limited nuclear war thinking in the second half of the 1950s. Yet the fundamental points of contention surrounding limited nuclear war remain with us today: What are the implications of limited nuclear war strategies and capabilities for deterrence? Do they enhance or erode deterrence? Is the shift from deterrence based on punishment to deterrence based on denial that is inherent in limited nuclear war strategies and capabilities to be embraced or resisted? Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. 42 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War Do limited nuclear war strategies and capabilities raise or lower the nuclear threshold? Can a nuclear war be kept limited? If there is to be war, today, as in the past, the most effective way to limit it in what remains a nuclear age is to refrain from the use of nuclear weapons. The distinction between nuclear use and nonuse remains “more familiar and... easier to maintain”117 than any distinction that may be employed to differentiate between, for instance, “tactical” and “strategic” nuclear weapons, or between their limited and unlimited use. The firewall between conventional and nuclear is distinct; if war is to be limited, it must not be breached. Since 1945, the international community has refrained from crossing the nuclear threshold. The use of nuclear weapons has come to be regarded as taboo; their nonuse is not only the norm but a norm. Nuclear abolition remains a distant goal; the formal institutionalization of the nonuse of nuclear weapons need not be. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. Notes 1. The classic works here include Glenn H. Snyder, Deterrence and Defense: Toward a Theory of National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961); Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Robert Jervis, “Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn’t Matter,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Winter 1979– 80), pp. 617–633. 2. An insightful overview is provided by Thomas G. Mahnken, Technology and the American Way of War since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 3. See Henry S. Rowen, “The Evolution of Strategic Nuclear Doctrine,” in Laurence Martin, ed., Strategic Thought in the Nuclear Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 131–156; Aaron L. Friedberg, “The Evolution of U.S. Strategic ‘Doctrine’—1945–1981,” in Samuel P. Huntington, ed., The Strategic Imperative: New Policies for American Security (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1982), pp. 53–99; and Tami Davis Biddle, “Shield and Sword: U.S. Strategic Forces and Doctrine since 1945,” in Andrew J. Bacevich, ed., The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Strategy since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 137–206. 4. Would everyone really have come to their senses in the heat of a nuclear exchange, even a “limited” nuclear exchange? 5. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response, a Pastoral Letter on War and Peace (Washington, DC: National Catholic Conference, 3 May 1983); Joseph S. Nye, Nuclear Ethics (New York: Free Press, Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 43 1986); and Bruce M. Russett, “Ethical Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterrence,” International Security, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Spring 1984), pp. 36–54. 6. See, for instance, Paul I. Bernstein, John P. Caves, Jr., and John F. Reichart, The Future Nuclear Landscape, Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Occasional Paper No. 5 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, April 2007), available at www.ndu.edu/WMDCenter/docUploaded/CSWMD_OP5.pdf; National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (Washington, DC: National Intelligence Council, November 2008), available at www.dni.gov/nic/ PDF_2025/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf; George H. Quester, Nuclear First Strike: Consequences of a Broken Taboo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 7. Robert D. Kaplan, “Living With a Nuclear Iran,” Atlantic, Vol. 306, No. 2 (September 2010), p. 73. 8. In addition to Kaplan, “Living With a Nuclear Iran,” see Keir A. Leiber and Daryl G. Press, “The Nukes We Need: Preserving the American Deterrent,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 6 (November/December 2009), pp. 39–51; David Ochmanek and Lowell H. Schwartz, The Challenge of Nuclear-Armed Regional Adversaries (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2008); David Isenberg, “The Return of Limited Nuclear War?” CounterPunch.org, 2 May 2008, available at www.counterpunch.org/isenberg05022008.html; accessed 12 August 2010. 9. Kaplan’s “Living With a Nuclear Iran” is a fawning return to Henry A. Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Brothers, for the Council on Foreign Relations, 1957). 10. Sir John Slessor, “The Great Deterrent and Its Limitations,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 12, No. 5 (May 1956), p. 141. 11. Henry A. Kissinger, “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 32, No. 3 (April 1956), p. 360. 12. Bernard Brodie, “More About Limited War,” World Politics, Vol. 10, No. 1 (October 1957), p. 116. 13. Bernard Brodie, “Nuclear Weapons: Strategic or Tactical,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 32, No. 2 (January 1954), p. 226. On the evolution of Brodie’s views about limited nuclear war and other things nuclear, see Barry H. Steiner, Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991). 14. Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 93 15. Brodie, “More About Limited War,” p. 114. 16. B. H. Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947), pp. 98–99. 17. Morton H. Halperin, “Nuclear Weapons and Limited War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 5, No. 2 (June 1961), p. 147. Unfortunately, these kinds of pieces no longer appear in the Journal of Conflict Resolution. See also Morton H. Halperin, Limited War in the Nuclear Age (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1963). Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. 44 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War 18. Brodie, “More About Limited War,” p. 113. 19. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy; and Robert E. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). 20. Dulles’ CFR speech is available at www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1556858/ posts. 21. John Foster Dulles, “Policy for Security and Peace,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 32, No. 3 (April 1954), p. 356. 22. Brodie, “Nuclear Weapons: Strategic or Tactical?,” pp. 226–227. 23. Bernard Brodie, “Strategy Hits a Dead End,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1955, p. 37. 24. Bernard Brodie, “Unlimited Weapons and Unlimited War,” Reporter, 18 November 1954, pp. 16, 18, and 19. 25. Kissinger, “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” p. 350. 26. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, p. 147. 27. As quoted in Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, p. 95. 28. Slessor, “The Great Deterrent and Its Limitations,” p. 145. 29. Colin Gray, “What RAND Hath Wrought,” Foreign Policy, No. 4 (Autumn 1971), p. 114. For contemporary reviews of the Kissinger and Osgood books, see Harold Karan Jacobson, “Scholarship and Security Policy: A Review of Recent Literature,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 1959), pp. 394–400; William W. Kaufmann, “The Crisis in Military Affairs,” World Politics, Vol. 10, No. 4 (July 1958), pp. 579–603; James E. King, Jr., “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy I—Limited Defense,” New Republic, 1 July 1957, pp. 18–21; and James E. King, Jr., “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy II—Limited Annihilation?” New Republic, 15 July 1957, pp. 16–18. 30. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 26. 31. Robert E. Osgood, “The Reappraisal of Limited War,” in Problems of Modern Strategy, Part I, Adelphi Paper No. 54 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1969), p. 42. 32. Brodie, “Unlimited Weapons and Unlimited War,” p. 19. 33. Kissinger, “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” p. 359. 34. Brodie, “More About Limited War,” pp. 114–115. 35. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 27. 36. Ibid., pp. 6–7. 37. Robert E. Osgood, “The Post-War Strategy of Limited War: Before, During and After Vietnam,” in Laurence Martin, ed., Strategic Thought in the Nuclear Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 93–130, returned to this theme. Seymour J. Deitchman, Limited War and American Defense Policy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), is useful on this point. 38. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 123. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., p. 7. 41. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, p. 188. Kissinger called for “the development of a wide spectrum of capabilities” (p. 146). Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 45 42. Ibid., p. 149. 43. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 126. 44. Ibid., p. 127. 45. Ibid., p. 140. 46. Ibid., pp. 1–2. A useful review of the meaning of limited war is provided by John Garnett, “Limited War,” in John Baylis, Ken Booth, John Garnett, and Phil Williams, Contemporary Strategy, Vol. 1, Theories and Concepts, 2nd ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987), pp. 187–208. For extended discussions of the meaning of limited war that are coupled with a series of case studies, see Robert McClintok, The Meaning of Limited War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), and Christopher M. Bacek, The Logic of Force: The Dilemma of Limited War in American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 47. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 2. Oskar Morgenstern too acknowledged the imprecision of the notion of limited war: “We cannot state precisely the point in the whole gamut of different forms of violence where a war stops being limited and begins to be unrestricted.” Oskar Morgenstern, The Question of National Defense (New York: Random House, 1959), p. 137. 48. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, pp. 2–3. 49. Ibid., p. 3. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. “There is one characteristic of overriding importance in distinguishing among wars: the nature of the objectives of which the belligerents fight. The decisive limitation upon war is the limitation of the objectives of war.” Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 4. See also Morgenstern, The Question of National Defense, p. 139. 53. Kissinger, “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” p. 357. His extended discussion of limited war is provided in Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, pp. 132–173. 54. Even mediocre minds. 55. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 235. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., p. 237. 58. Ibid., p. 236. 59. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, p. 160. For his discussion of the required air, ground, and naval capabilities, see ibid., pp. 155–167. 60. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 237. 61. Ibid., p. 238. 62. William W. Kaufmann, “Limited Warfare,” in William W. Kaufmann, ed., Military Policy and National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 127. 63. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 249. 64. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, pp. 156 and 157. On these points, see also Morgenstern, The Question of National Defense, pp. 145–148. Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. 46 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War 65. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 251. 66. Ibid., p. 258. 67. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, p. 199. Limited nuclear war here is akin to the limited strategic war discussed in Klaus Knorr and Thornton Read, eds., Limited Strategic War (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962). Ian Clark, Limited Nuclear War: Political Theory and War Conventions (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982), examines limited nuclear war in the context of the historical development of thought on limited war. 68. Kissinger, “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” p. 360. For a contemporary discussion of the role of limited war strategy in the NATO context, see Malcolm W. Hoag, “The Place of Limited War in NATO Strategy,” in Klaus Knorr, ed., NATO and American Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 98–126. 69. Edward Teller, “The Feasibility of Arms Control and the Principle of Openness,” in Donald G. Brennan, ed., Arms Control, Disarmament, and National Security (New York: George Braziller, 1961, for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), p. 133. 70. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, pp. 248–249. 71. Ibid., p. 249. 72. Ibid., p. 251. 73. John Slessor, The Great Deterrent (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), p. 266. 74. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 253. 75. Paul H. Nitze, “Atoms, Strategy and Policy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 34, No. 2 (January 1956), pp. 187–188. 76. Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959, 1965), p. 310. 77. Ibid., p. 314. 78. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 254. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., p. 255. 81. Kissinger, “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” p. 359. 82. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, pp. 256 and 258–259; Kissinger, “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” p. 359. Nitze, “Atoms, Strategy and Policy,” pp. 187–198, also embraced graduated deterrence. For the case for and discussions of graduated deterrence, see Anthony W. Buzzard, “Massive Retaliation and Graduated Deterrence,” World Politics, Vol. 8, No. 2 (January 1956), pp. 228–237; Anthony W. Buzzard, John Slessor, and Richard Lowenthal, “The H-Bomb: Massive Retaliation or Graduated Deterrence?,” International Affairs, Vol. 32, No. 2 (April 1956), pp. 146–165; and P. M. S. Blackett, Atomic Weapons and East-West Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956). 83. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 257. 84. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, p. 188. 85. Kissinger, “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” p. 362. 86. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 257. Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory 47 87. Kissinger, “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” p. 357, agreed that “any war is likely to be a nuclear war.” 88. “We must count upon these [nuclear] weapons becoming an integral part of our military policies and our national strategy.” Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy, p. 258. 89. Ibid., p. 136. 90. Slessor, “The Great Deterrent and Its Limitations,” p. 146. 91. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, p. 188. 92. Ibid., p. 192. Morgenstern, an escalation optimist of the first order, sneeringly asserted that “the idea that any atomic weapon, any atomic explosion, is a disaster of a magnitude that the world cannot stand, that is spells the beginning of the end of the earth, that it poisons the atmosphere for future generations, is, of course, unmitigated nonsense.” Morgenstern, The Question of National Defense, p. 153. 93. Teller, “The Feasibility of Arms Control and the Principle of Openness,” p. 134. Further, on p. 133: “I can see no clear-cut reason why a limited war should necessarily grow into an all-out war. The assertion of this necessity is merely the Russians’ way of advancing the threat of a massive retaliation. They know very well that the employment of tactical nuclear weapons would be to our great advantage. They try to use every possible means of dissuading us from using them. They are doing it more subtly by stating that all-out war is a necessary result of any use of nuclear weapons rather than by stating that all-out war will be started by their side as a measure of retaliation.” 94. The debate between escalation optimists and pessimists was reviewed by Halperin under the heading “Stability of Limited Nuclear War.” Halperin, “Nuclear Weapons and Limited War,” pp. 151–153. Halperin here argued that, contrary to Kissinger, conventional limited war is more stable than limited nuclear war. 95. Brodie, “Strategy Hits a Dead End,” pp. 35 and 36. 96. Brodie, “More About Limited War,” p. 117. 97. James E. King, Jr., “Nuclear Plenty and Limited War,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 35, No. 2 (January 1957), p. 243. 98. As quoted in Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, p. 111. 99. Kaufmann, “Limited Warfare,” p. 121. 100. As quoted in Leslie H. Gelb, with Richard Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1979), p. 111. A useful review of work on escalation is provided by Lawrence Freedman, “On the Tiger’s Back: The Development of the Concept of Escalation,” in Roman Kolkowicz, ed., The Logic of Nuclear Terror (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 109–152. A recent, useful return to work on escalation is Forrest E. Morgan, Karl P. Mueller, Evan S. Medeiros, Kevin L. Pollpeter, and Roger Cliff, Dangerous Thresholds: Managing Escalation in the 21st Century (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2008). 101. For operational planners, at least. 102. Michael E. Howard, “On Fighting a Nuclear War,” International Security, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Spring 1981), p. 14. Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37. 48 Assessing the History of Limited Nuclear War Copyright © 2014. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. 103. Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age, p. 330 (emphasis in the original). 104. Halperin, “Nuclear Weapons and Limited War,” p. 165. 105. Henry A. Kissinger, “Limited War: Conventional or Nuclear? A Reappraisal,” Daedalus, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Fall 1960), p. 806. 106. Ibid., p. 807. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid., p. 808. 109. Ibid., p. 809 (emphasis in the original). 110. Osgood, “The Reappraisal of Limited War,”, p. 45. 111. Robert E. Osgood, Limited War Revisited (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979); and Osgood, “The Post-War Strategy of Limited War,” pp. 93–130. 112. Osgood, Limited War Revisited, p. 58. 113. John C. Garnett, “Limited ‘Conventional’ War in the Nuclear Age,” in Michael Howard, ed., Restraints on War: Studies in the Limitation of Armed Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 79. 114. Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age, pp. 312–313. 115. Limited-war theory, as Freedman put it, “was not a theory about the primacy of political objectives over military means, but of the primacy of military realities over political objectives.” Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, p. 100. 116. Ibid., p. 92. 117. Kissinger, “Limited War: Conventional or Nuclear?,” p. 807. Larsen, Jeffrey A., and Kerry M. Kartchner. On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, Stanford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1642553. Created from kcl on 2023-11-26 17:13:37.