Living with Mega-Death

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"The current debate is not about the desirability of nuclear war," says Gray. "It is about the best means of deterring war. I believe in damage-limitation and in a war-fighting strategy. That requires—in addition to appropriate offensive forces—air defense, missile defense and civil defense. If American casualties could, by these methods, be held to 20 million, that would be very horrible, but it is damage from which we could recover. This posture would make the Soviets take our deterrence more seriously."

These and other advocates of what they regard as a tough-minded, unemotional view of the issue believe that the U.S. could and should fight a nuclear war with the Soviets if the only alternatives were either Soviet conquest of an area vital to American interests or, worse, a Soviet nuclear attack on the U.S. Indeed, that view is at the very heart of U.S. policy toward its Soviet adversaries and its West European and Japanese allies.

There are three assumptions underlying the American response to the Soviet challenge: 1) that the U.S.S.R. conducts both domestic and foreign policy on the basis offeree; 2) that while there may be various marginal ways of inducing good behavior by the Kremlin with carrots, the U.S. must ultimately rely on the big stick to deter Soviet aggression; 3) since nuclear weapons are deployed in huge numbers on both sides, the U.S. must have a "force posture" that will dissuade the Soviets from throwing their considerable nuclear weight around. It is not necessary for the U.S. to match the Soviets missile for missile, megaton for megaton, but it is necessary that the U.S. have the recognized capability to make the Soviets pay an unacceptably high price for aggression. Deterrence is more than just a matter of quantity and quality of weapons; it is also a matter of plans, procedures, command structure and vigorous, ongoing testing programs that will make the arms that have been deployed seem capable of being employed.

Two other factors have driven the U.S. toward reiterating over the years its willingness not only to use nuclear weapons but to use them first. One is that America's principal allies, whom it is sworn to defend, are separated by oceans from the U.S., are uncomfortably close to the U.S.S.R. and are reluctant to bear their share of their own defenses. The other factor is that the conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact are numerically superior to those of NATO. Thus the U.S., in its role as protector of Western Europe and Japan, has fallen back on its nuclear weapons as an equalizer for its disadvantages in geography, conventional forces and manpower.

For this cluster of reasons, the U.S. has had to convince itself, its allies and the Soviets that if push came to shove, the U.S. would have the option of "going nuclear." But for that option to be real, and for the American threat to be credible, there must be widespread acceptance of the proposition that U.S. forces would be "survivable and enduring." That is why General Jones is so concerned about protecting the U.S. command-and-control network from the disruptions of EMP. That is why there is an elaborate chain of command so that someone would always be empowered to transmit the "emergency