Rational Superiority, Crises, and Arms Control, 1961–1963

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Cameron
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
National Security ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Rhetoric ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Test Ban

Chapter 1 describes how John F. Kennedy rose to power by articulating his own new nuclear strategy, which would use the latest advances in social and organizational sciences, combined with US superiority in nuclear weapons, to defend the United States’ national security interests. The foremost exponent of this strategy of “rational superiority” was Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. The chapter then explains how this scheme was dealt a series of blows by Kennedy’s experiences during the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, which disabused him of the idea that nuclear superiority could be used to coerce the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the Kennedy administration used the rhetoric of rational superiority to advance the Limited Test Ban Treaty and was planning to employ it as part of the president’s reelection campaign in 1964. Kennedy had not reconciled this gap between his public rhetoric and personal doubts at the time of his death.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Cameron
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
Johnson Administration ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Central Argument

The introductory chapter outlines an established consensus that the United States’ shift from a policy of nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union to a policy that emphasized arms control, mutual assured destruction, and nuclear parity was the result of nuclear-strategic calculus. It then shows how declassified records of Nixon’s conversations with his advisors on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) disprove that thesis. It goes on to outline how Kennedy and Johnson administration officials also acted in ways that contradicted their private comments. Through brief summaries of the subsequent chapters, it then explicates the central argument of the book: that all three presidents were engaged in a double game to reconcile their personal doubts regarding the utility of nuclear weapons with the prevailing public and congressional mood during their administrations. It concludes by suggesting this dynamic is of enduring relevance to the formulation of American nuclear strategy.

Trial Balloons

2020 ◽  
pp. 84-105
Author(s):  
Simon Miles
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Force ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
East And West ◽  
General Secretary

This chapter is devoted to Konstantin Chernenko' efforts to shift superpower relations back to a détente-like footing during his time as a General Secretary of the Soviet Union. It examines attempts on the part of various Western leaders to carve out a role for themselves as the superpowers' chosen intermediary. It also investigates the balance of power between East and West, including how and why leaders in Washington and Moscow perceived and responded to each other as they did. The chapter analyzes the nuclear freeze movement, which has remained a political force to be reckoned with as the movement called for both superpowers to halt the construction and deployment of nuclear weapons. It talks about the freeze activists in the United States who shepherded the passage of nonbinding resolutions that support their cause in four state legislatures, the House, and the Senate.

The continuing threat of nuclear war

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Winter

The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as 100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures. The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.

15. The Return to Confrontation, 1979–80

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Short Range ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Slow Progress ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This chapter examines why the United States and the Soviet Union returned to confrontation during the period 1979–1980. Despite the slow progress of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), there were at least some efforts to control strategic weapons. Short-range and intermediate-range nuclear weapons, in contrast, continued to grow in number and sophistication, particularly in Europe, where NATO and Warsaw Pact forces still prepared for war against each other, despite détente. The failure to control theatre nuclear weapons led to a new twist in the European arms race at the end of the 1970s which helped to undermine recent improvements in East–West relations. The chapter first considers NATO’s ‘dual track’ decision regarding theatre nuclear weapons before discussing the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. It concludes with an assessment of the revival of the Cold War, focusing on the so-called Carter Doctrine.

Future Forces and Future Policies

1973 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 35-39
Author(s):  
Richard L. Garwin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
National Security ◽  
Great Improvement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nixon Administration ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
National Capital ◽  
Missile Attack ◽  
Do So

Pertinent Highlights of the SALT Agreements: The SALT I Agreements signed in Moscow May 26, 1972, were the result of more than three years of negotiation by the Nixon Administration. They provide the basis for a great improvement in national security. The ABM Treaty recognizes the technical reality that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States can defend its population or industry against ballistic missile attack and that it is not simply wasteful but counterproductive to try to do so. The treaty limits each side to a negligible defense at two sites—the national capital and another at least 800 miles away. Furthermore, it limits the number of radar complexes around the national capital to six, at most, and the number of interceptors at each of the two sites to 100, with the clear implication that not only should these defenses against missiles be penetrable but also destroyable by those missiles.

The future unlike the past: nuclear proliferation and American security policy

1981 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nacht
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future ◽  
Nuclear Arms Control

An examination of the past relationships between nuclear proliferation and American security policy substantiates several propositions. First, the political relationship between the United States and each new nuclear weapon state was not fundamentally transformed as a result of nuclear proliferation. Second, with the exception of the Soviet Union, no new nuclear state significantly affected U.S. defense programs or policies. Third, American interest in bilateral nuclear arms control negotiations has been confined to the Soviet Union. Fourth, a conventional conflict involving a nonnuclear ally prompted the United States to intervene in ways it otherwise might not have in order to forestall the use of nuclear weapons.In all respects, however, the relationship between nuclear proliferation and American security policy is changing. The intensification of the superpower rivalry and specific developments in their nuclear weapons and doctrines, the decline of American power more generally, and the characteristics of nuclear threshold states all serve to stimulate nuclear proliferation. It will be increasingly difficult in the future for American security policy to be as insulated from this process as it has been in the past.

scholarly journals From the Open Skies Proposal of 1955 to the Norstad Plan of 1960: A Plan Too Far

2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 66-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Tal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear Test ◽  
West Germany ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Incremental Approach ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Test Ban

A proposal drafted by General Lauris Norstad for the creation of a limited inspection zone in Central Europe and in the Arctic Circle—a proposal that came to be known as the Norstad Plan—evolved out of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Open Skies proposal. The proposal, based on ideas promoted by Eisenhower's disarmament adviser, Harold Stassen, departed from traditional U.S. disarmament policy. The plan was eventually aborted by West Germany and France, but the document heralded a shift in Eisenhower's disarmament policy. The president was ready to give up the all-or-nothing approach and adopt an incremental approach. To this end, the United States would make concessions that would render U.S. proposals more acceptable to the Soviet Union. The plan adumbrated the conceptual change that paved the way for the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Cameron
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personal Beliefs ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
The Cold War

The conclusion summarizes the argument of the book as a whole, pointing to the central importance of domestic public and congressional opinion since the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and through the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of Richard Nixon’s administration, in the formulation of US nuclear strategy, even when such opinion diverges fundamentally from the views of the president. This forces presidents into playing a double game in their attempt to reconcile their personal beliefs on nuclear weapons with public expectations. The chapter argues that this dilemma is common across U.S. national security policymaking, but is especially acute in the case of nuclear strategy because of its extremely abstract nature. The chapter concludes by showing how the double game between presidents and their publics played out for the rest of the Cold War. It then offers a tentative prediction regarding its resurgence as the United States’ global commitments come under new pressure from Russia and China.

Armand Hammer, Lenin, and the First American Concession in Soviet Russia

Slavic Review ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip S. Gillette
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Government ◽  
Personal Relations ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
American Trade

In 1921 a young American doctor named Armand Hammer went to Russia, met Lenin, and undertook the first American concession in Soviet Russia. Interest in this episode has been heightened by the fact that fifty years later Armand Hammer, as chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, forged new commercial links between the United States and the Soviet Union. This article provides a new interpretation of Hammer’s meeting with Lenin and his receipt of the first American concession granted by the Soviet government. It throws light on how Soviet national security objectives and personal relations can influence Soviet government decisions on American trade.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency

1970 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
George H. Quester
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Atomic Energy Agency ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Atomic Energy ◽  
Energy Agency ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist China

The United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have put forward a Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons beyond those five nations which currently possess them: France, the People's Republic of China (Communist China), the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The treaty requires that signatories already possessing such weapons not give them to other countries and that signatories not yet posses-sing nuclear weapons forego accepting them or manufacturing them indigenously. To reinforce the latter restraint the treaty obligates states renouncing weapons to accept inspection safeguards on their peaceful nuclear activities, inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

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