In response to:
The Cosmic Bluff from the July 21, 1983 issue
To the Editors:
George Ball’s “The Cosmic Bluff” [NYR, July 21] is first-rate. Its these should be drummed into all of those, in this country and abroad, who have not yet understood that their future is made tenuous by the US and NATO strategy that Field Marshall Lord Carver accurately calls “either a bluff or a suicide pact.”
Ball’s piece does, however, share one unfortunate feature with the recent Scowcroft committee report. The latter made an irresistible case for abolishing the M-X program, and then recommended going ahead with it. Ball makes an equally powerful case for a US No-First-Use declaration, and then, in his last paragraph, opposes it. (He opposes it at least “until an adequate conventional defense is firmly in place.” Since alliance, administration, and military authorities never consider defenses “adequate” nor “firmly in place,” the quoted clause is in fact an exact synonym for “until hell freezes over.”)
Consider some of Ball’s points:
“It will be hard to induce Europeans to free themselves of the nuclear mystique….”
“We should…soberly rethink the strategic plans of the Western alliance and take the hard measures necessary to create an effective conventional strategy.”
“…we should resolutely undertake to build a deterrent that can survive a test of wills….”
“The incremental economic burden required to raise NATO’s strength is…quite manageable.”
“…I recognize that any alliance is inherently hard to galvanize into effective common action….”
“To generate that requisite political will requires facing reality, which will not be easy.”
“…they [the Europeans] have become habituated over three decades to relying blindly on our nuclear shield; and such hardened habits of thought cannot be easily altered.”
In brief, Ball accurately shows that we face a monumental task. We must change fundamental thought patterns that have driven for a generation and are today driving our strategic concepts, military plans, indoctrination, organization, and programs. We must undertake the manageable but substantial measures that must necessarily follow from the changed concepts: stiffening some elements of the conventional forces; tailoring the nuclear forces to the sole mission of retaliation against nuclear attack; reeducating, retraining, to some degree reorganizing the forces. Ball refers only to effecting these reforms in Europe. In fact, revolutionizing strategic thought and effecting necessary program changes will be as necessary and as difficult in the US.
To carry out such a massive reform demands powerful political will: widespread official and public support continuing over a period of years. The political will cannot be generated and maintained without a clearly stated objective, and pursuing that objective must produce diplomatic and bureaucratic leverage powerful enough to drive the program, generate the support, and give direction and coherence to the hundreds of necessary contributing actions. That objective would be expressed and that leverage applied by a US declaration that this country will not be the first to use nuclear weapons in any future hostilities, the No-First-Use declaration. Even the prospect of such a declaration, in the relatively short term, after discussions with allies and initiating necessary military steps, would make the conceptual and program changes Ball advocates inevitable.
Ball’s discussion does not bring out all aspects of the case for No-First-Use; there are other persuasive arguments. His points are enough in themselves, however, to undercut his last paragraph’s dismissal of a No-First-Use declaration. When you reprint the article for the widest possible distribution, here and abroad, an urgent public service that would do you credit, leave out the last paragraph.
Vice Admiral John Marshall Lee
St. Petersburg, Florida
To the Editors:
I have long been a George Ball fan and regarded his views to be among the sanest coming out of Washington but I believe he has gone astray in calling our nuclear threat a bluff. We are in bad shape if it is a bluff but I am rather certain it is not.
There is a well-defined line in Europe separating Soviet and Western spheres of influence. If a Soviet military force should cross that line it would be demolished immediately by tactical nuclear weapons. There the matter would, in all likelihood, end. Neither adversary would have the slightest interest in escalating the affair. Of course it will never happen. To embark on rash adventurism of such grave proportions is probably unthinkable in Moscow. The Soviets are defensively minded, not offensively minded. Throughout history Russia has been ravished by invaders so naturally the Soviets are being extremely diligent about defense, about maintaining a huge military establishment, about consolidating a buffer zone of puppet states on its borders.
Later I will argue that the idea of a Soviet attack on the West is really pure fantasy but for the moment let us indulge in fantasy. Suppose a leader of great imagination and daring has worked his way to the top of the deadliest, most ritualistic bureaucracy in the world; of course the supposition is ridiculous but this is fantasy. Our hero decides to check out George Ball’s theory. First he must convince a number of powerful people (who have moved up through the same bureaucracy) that this is a good idea. Can you imagine him pulling that off? But let us press on. He has persuaded them that it is not really a very risky project. “The West has no interest in a holocaust,” he argues. “It may demolish our expeditionary force or it may not. If not, we expand our buffer zone and demonstrate the weakness of decadent capitalism. If it does, we have lost a small fraction of our military force. That would not be a great loss and the possible gain is quite large.”
The so-called bluff would be tested in some such limited context as that; it would not be tested in an end-of-the-world scenario. Who would risk all to check out the possibility that a threat might be a bluff? Since the test of the threat would have limited consequences, making good on the threat would have limited consequences.
Mr. Ball worries that if a US president used tactical nuclear weapons on a marauding Soviet force we would all suffer a devastating sense of guilt for again unleashing the nuclear monster. He need not worry. The impending Soviet attack would not go unnoticed. In fact, it would generate a state of great tension and partial mobilization. The president would make clear that crossing the line would be an act of war. When, in the midst of this tension, the Soviets did cross the line the shock here would be of the order of that following the attack on Pearl Harbor. We would be outraged at such blatant aggression and would cheer mightily when the Soviet legions were promptly blasted off the map. Any loose guilt lying around would fit very nicely on the Soviets for disturbing the peace. Some may point out that we did not get very excited when Soviet forces moved into Hungary and Czechoslovakia; Mr. Ball would not do that because he knows where the line is. If the Soviets had moved into Poland last year we would have done nothing again; Poland is on the Soviet side of the line.
Now let us turn from fantasy to fact. The Soviet Union has it made as a world power despite being well behind the West in technology, despite having a terribly unproductive economy which is doomed to stay that way until it sees the light and provides its citizens with incentives to work, despite having an antiquated agricultural system that ties up half of the labor force and still fails to feed the nation. Soviet leaders are fully aware of the nation’s backwardness; that has been the millstone around Russia’s neck since the time of Peter the Great. Because of that handicap the Soviets have been haunted by the specter of the nuclear threat and have devoted an inordinate proportion of their resources to trying to match that threat. They have done pretty well but at enormous expense to their society.
They cannot be content though. They continue to be haunted because modern warfare is highly technological. It rests not only on nuclear weapons but on elaborate electronic systems which are vulnerable to electronic countermeasures. In this field the Soviets are no match for the West. Modern warfare cannot get along without great computers; the Soviets are five or six years behind the West in that field. Hence the Soviets must take refuge in the blunderbuss of great missiles carrying great bombs and hope that will ward off any Western thoughts of conquest. Poor old Russia cannot have any dreams of conquest; despite armies of spies it can never be certain what sort of electronic deviltry it will encounter in combat. Will the Soviet weapons be paralyzed? When one cannot calculate the risks one cannot attack.
There is a good deal of fighting going on here and there around the world but none of it is modern warfare. If the West and the Soviets got into combat we would see modern warfare which uses small rapidly moving forces that deliver a big punch with great accuracy. The big punches might be large conventional bombs but more often small nuclear bombs. The West has that sort of military force. The Soviets have a smattering of one also but mostly they have a huge World War II style army; as usual they are behind the times. That ponderous behemoth would be chewed up in short order by modern military forces.
The Soviets doubtless know that their great army would be ineffective in modern warfare. They probably maintain it because they have difficulty providing jobs for all the youths that finish schooling each year. One thing that would make that army more effective would be a ban on nuclear weapons. The Soviets are actively promoting such a ban and have renounced first use of the weapons.
We will not fall for that. That would let them define the rules of the game to their advantage. That would force the West to maintain a huge army of its own. That would bring on the draft with a vengeance. As it is, we are in fine shape. We have neutralized the Soviet army with a great deal of technology and relatively few people.
I am sure that we would be happy to consider banning all strategic nuclear weapons systems. That would free the world from the threat of destruction and confine military combat to conflicts between military forces. But the Soviets couldn’t agree to that because they can guess how those conflicts would turn out; they need the threat of the blunderbuss to fall back on. The blunderbuss would be very difficult for them to give up anyway because they have made such a great sacrifice to get it. They see no problem with it because they do not intend to use it. The Soviets will confine their aggression to low key, relatively riskless sorts of activities as consolidating their buffer zone and stirring up the barefoot citizens of the LDC’s in the hope of creating a little trouble for the greedy elites that exploit them and possibly picking up a friendly government once in a while.
