Philip Bobbitt

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey

The new relation of air power to strategy presents one of the distinguishing contrasts between this war and the last. Air power in the last war was in its infancy. The new role of three-dimensional warfare was even then foreseen by a few farsighted men, but planes were insufficient in quality and quantity to permit much more than occasional brilliant assistance to the ground forces.

Alternatives to Nuclear Deterrence

In the preceding chapter I argued that extended deterrence might be replaced by multiplying nuclear deterrents; that actually to constitute a force that was not, in the present strategic environment, self-deterred, these new independent nuclear forces would require sophisticated surveillance, command arrangements, and selective, counterforce capability; that such forces would amount to a ‘polar’ rearrangement of the current system with uncertain results for nuclear deterrence.

The Finletter Report: Survival in the Air Age

We believe that the United States will be secure in an absolute sense only if the institution of war itself is abolished under a regime of law. There was a time when the United States could tolerate with safety a world in which war was the final way of settling disputes among nations. For even if war came the United States could be reasonably sure not only of winning it but even of keeping enemy forces away from its shores. Our geographical position, our Navy, our industrial capacity, our manpower, and the armies, navies, and air forces of nations allied or associated with us, protected us against direct attack in the two World Wars through which we have just passed. But, with the recent revolution in applied science for destruction which is still going on, these safeguards are no longer enough.

The Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy

United States defense planning has long been dominated by two extreme contingenices. The first is a massive conventional attack against NATO by the Warsaw Pact, directed primarily at taking over Western Europe. The second, even more apocalyptic, is an unrestrained Soviet nuclear attack on US strategic forces and other military targets in the West, many of which are located in or near cities. The first contingency leaves essentially no ally the chance to opt out, the second leaves the United States no incentive to exercise restraint.

The Scowcroft Report: The Report of the President’s Commission On Strategic Forces, April 1983

The responsibility given to this Commission is to review the purpose, character, size, and composition of the strategic forces of the United States. The members of the Commission fully understand not only the purposes for which this nation maintains its deterrent, but also the devastating nature of nuclear warfare, should deterrence fail. The Commission believes that effective arms control is an essential element in diminishing the risk of nuclear war — while preserving our liberties and those of like-minded nations. At the same time the Commission is persuaded that as we consider the threat of mass destruction we must consider simultaneously the threat of aggressive totalitarianism. Both are central to the political dilemmas of our age. For the United States and its allies the essential dual task of statecraft is, and must be, to avoid the first and contain the second.

Statement by President Harry S. Truman Announcing the Use of the A-Bomb at Hiroshima 6 August 1945

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam’ which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.

Prologue: The Theory of Strategic Bombing and the Coming of Nuclear Weapons

‘Strategic thought draws its inspiration each century, or rather at each moment in history, from the problems which events themselves pose.’1 The decisive strategic events of the post-war nuclear age, those that determined the utterly changed strategic circumstances of that age, occurred within a few months of each other. They were the acquisition by the Soviet Union, in August 1949, of a workable fission bomb and the decision by the United States, in January 1950, to develop the hydrogen bomb. These two events, taken together, meant that, in time, the classical strategic paradigms of defence and punishment would be opposed by a new paradigm. Yet it would be some time before this fact was appreciated, as we shall see, and this forces a Conradian chronology on our narrative: even after these events, political and doctrinal choices were made that were responsive to the old world. To see why the context was wholly changed by these particular events, to appreciate the depth and character of this change, we must look at the period superseded.

Alternative Nuclear Strategies

The realization that the Soviet Union did not endorse strategic concepts based on the deterrence assumption has intensified the disenchantment with those concepts.1 This realization was slow in coming, given the inferior Soviet position relative to US armaments that tended to mask Soviet intentions, a patronizing Western attitude toward Soviet military doctrine,2 and the American optimism in foreign affairs that arises from what sometimes appears to be an invincible ethnocentricity. We are often unable both to take Russian security concerns seriously, from their point of view, and to recognize that this point of view poses a danger to the West. In the light of the tremendous US buildup in the early 1960s, it was plausible to assume that the Soviet deployments and acquisitions of the late 1960s were simply a responsive effort to defend against US pre-emption. McNamara among many others3 predicted that a levelling off would occur once a secure, assured destruction capability was gained. They were perhaps persuaded that there were no significant implications for deterrence in the margin between this capability and full parity anyway.

Essential Equivalence and the Countervailing Strategy

The period between 1968 and 1974 may fairly be characterized as one of continuity in strategic doctrine. President Nixon renamed the doctrine he inherited, calling it ‘Strategic Sufficiency’,1 doubtless appreciating its positive contributions to fiscal restraint. Relying on the unchanged substance of the doctrine, he used it as the basis for strategic arms limitation talks, originated by Johnson but uncommenced owing to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.2 Strategic doctrine of this period, as we have seen, included an important role for arms control and that doctrine also structured the treaties that then and have since emerged from the SALT process.

The Ideologies of Nuclear Deterrence

The development of the ideas of nuclear deterrence has reached an impasse, one that almost replicates, intellectually, the stalemate that has been thought to persist strategically. Two views, locked in dialectic since the beginning of the thermonuclear age, appear at present as if imprisoned in amber. Neither offers independent criteria for choosing between them. Taking these two views together, we are unable to predict the future conditions of deterrence. And finally, they do not enable us to decide whether effective deterrence is eroding or simply recurring in a cyclical pattern of anxiety and reassurance.